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Vacationing can be risky business. There's no telling what awaits in your planned getaways. And even when you do enjoy a particular destination, it's over much too soon and you're on to the next stop in the itinerary or heading home. That pretty much sums up the experience in the new off-Broadway musical "See Rock City...". It takes you all over the place -- some stops truly quite beautiful, but we're seldom there long enough to savor the thrill.

The concept is intriguing. Each scene is built around a tourist site where we meet a set of characters whose stories play out in brief unconnected vignettes. First it's on the road to Rock City in the South where a drifter and a waitress search for meaning in their lives. Then it's the desert in Roswell, New Mexico with a young man determined to prove aliens are among us.

The Alamo is another stop where a lonely woman and her elderly grandfather have a welcome close encounter of the human kind. There are visits to Alaska, Coney Island and Niagara Falls as well.

The stories, in a book written by Adam Mathias, are for the most part compelling but the show's disjointedness has the effect of either ending too abruptly just as we're getting sucked in or overstaying their welcome. That said, the show deserves applause for its originality and the production's many pluses. The music by Brad Alexander with lyrics by Mathias is consistently lovely. The songs are polished and catchy displaying the composers' gift for writing tunes that are both versatile and genuinely moving.

The show is staged at the Duke Theatre in a largely empty space surrounded by an audience seated in beach chairs. There's an improvisational effect that could easily backfire if not for the highly professional company under the helm of director Jack Cummings III who've managed to evoke vivid landscapes through virtually little more than sheer force of talent.

As a work in progress, "See Rock City..." is on the right track. But it's got a ways to go before it can reach the promised land of theatrical success.