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Noel Coward had it right. Cheap music can be very, very potent.

When the band at “Dream a Little Dream” finally breaks into the title song, the ache of nostalgia sweeps you back—swept me back—with a double-whammy. First to the 1960s, with the ghosts of the Village Gate, of Bleecker Street, of the smoke-wreathed Village itself, hovering all around. Then all the way farther back in prehistoric time to when that song’s sweet dumb romantic words and music were first conceived and woven together.

Stars shining bright above you,

Night breezes seem to whisper I love you,

Birds singing in the sycamore trees.

Dream a little dream of me

“That song was written back in the 30s or 20s by Fabian Andres and two other people,” says Dennis Doherty. “Mexican people. Michelle’s father, Gil, was a probation officer who had to go across the border and arrest suspects, and he was a pal of Fabian’s.

“I love old songs,” says Doherty, and forthwith gives out with a few deep-chested bars of “You’ll Never Know,” circa 1940. Then his puckish face clouds. “I did that one for an album with a full band,” he says morosely, “and it just disappeared.”

He is saying this backstage at the Village Theater, on Bleecker Street, former premises of Art D’Lugoff’s Village Gate, where for 38 dear years virtually everybody in the world of jazz, folk music, or other miscellaneous entertainment passed through, either as performer or onlooker.

The Michelle whose father knew Fabian Andres is Michelle Philips, she of the Mamas and Papas: John Philips, wife Michelle Philips, Dennis Doherty, and Mama Cass Elliott, the lady—hell, the broad—who thought up their handle. What finally put paid to the Mamas and Papas was the eternal triangle of two men and one girl, the girl being Michelle. Except that in this case there was also another, interlocking triangle: Michelle, Denny, and Mama Cass Elliott, all 300 passionate pounds of her.

As I said, a double-whammy.

“Dream a Little Dream,” the show at the Village Theater, is about the roman-candle liftoff and four short years later abrupt downswoop of that 1960s platinum-plated group; and about those four people, two of whom, John Phillips and Cass Elliott, are now dead. It is also a sort of running autobiography of narrator-cum-star Doherty himself, starting at birth in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Nov. 29, 1940.

This somewhat solipsistic approach bothered the bloodless reviewer of the New York Times, but it doesn’t bother me. Dennis Doherty, about whom I knew nothing before, is the opposite of a bloodless type, and he was dreaming dreams in Greenwich Village when all the rest of us were too.

His mind and his recollections jump back and forth like a time machine with a loose connection—from 1975, for instance (“when I came back to New York to do ‘The Man on the Moon’ with Monique van Vooren”), to 1960 (“with the three of us, two Irish fellers and a French Canadian, shivering our ass off at Eastport, Maine”), to 1996 (“this show started at the White Point Lodge on the eastern shore of Nova Scotia”), to now (“well, actually, I do have a lady friend…”).

In the middle of an anecdote Doherty suddenly says out of the corner of his mouth, parodying a showbiz agent, a Sammy Glick: “If it doesn’t move the plot forward, fuhgettit!”

Let’s sort a little of it out.

His parents:

Mary Elisabeth Emberly Doherty, “housewife and mystic.” Dennis Doherty senior, “an ironworker for 28 years, and plumber, and marine steamfitter; that’s what I was supposed to do, except that I was supposed to do better, be a machinist.” Dennis is the second of their four offspring.

His wives:

1. The late Linda Woodward, from Manchester, N.H., “who went to Sarah Lawrence and found that the train came all the way to the Village, and stayed there, and who, God rest her, used to wait tables here when George Carlin was performing here.”

2. The late Jeanette Chastenay, a New Yorker of Swiss/French ancestry, who was taken—like Linda, by cancer—five years ago.

“I’ve had two wives. John [Philips] had a lot of wives. But it doesn’t move the plot, the story forward,” says Doherty, in his own voice now. “Only the dalliances move the story forward.”

His kids:

John, 21, who plays drums, guitar, and keyboard in this very show, right behind dad who’s singing and talking up a storm.

Emberly, 22, who’s taking theater at Dalhousie University in Halifax “and is coming down to New York this summer to just hang.”

The dalliances:

Well, the one that of course moves the story forward was the on-again off-again on-again off-again footsies with Mrs. John Philips, the golden-girl California post-teeny-bopper who had a roving eye to begin with.

The Mamas and the Papas started in the Village, on this very street.

“We’d been training for stardom all the way from the Village to Los Angeles—and suddenly, what was going on between the four of us was terminal. Driving to airports together,” Doherty dryly says. “Michelle, the party girl, talking about the night before, and John trying to keep up, and me the putz—forget it.”

What was going on between the four of us—because, never forget her, there was also Mama Cass, the former Ellen Naomi Cohen of Baltimore, Md., she whose 1,000-watt voice, emanating from the Bitter End one night in 1961, had overwhelmed 21-year-old Dennis, the kid from Halifax. “Not to use a cliché, but I was drawn in like a moth to a candle. There she was, in the center between two men who were trying to keep up.”

She and Denny had ended up that night sharing a bottle under a table at The Dugout. Big Cass Elliott longed to share much more than that throughout the ensuing years of folderol around Michelle. What she, not so silently eating her heart out, longed for from Dennis Doherty, he could never, well almost never, return in kind.

“Given time,” says today’s Doherty, “who knows how this would have resolved itself. But given the situation then, it couldn’t be resolved in the time we had. The problem was, keeping those four voices intact. Sex wasn’t the brass ring. It was the monkey wrench.”

So that’s the story. Actually rather a moving story, no?

“Yes, it is,” Doherty says. “And it’s hard some nights [in the show] how far to go with that.”

As noted, the 1996 birthplace of “Dream a Little Dream”—the production, not the song—was White Point Lodge, on the eastern shore of Nova Scotia.

“A lot of Texas oil money there. The manager was a friend of my friend, [playwright] Paul Ledoux. He asked us to do a show. ‘Whatever you guys come up with.’ So after two weeks of eating plank salmon and drinking the poor man out of business—banging the idea together, meeting the musicians—we came up with this. It was 26 fucking hours long—‘Hey, we’re not doing “Nicholas Nickleby”’—but there was so much to say, to cover, from 1940 [Denny’s start in life] to 1971 [demise of the Mamas and the Papas].”

A few way stations later, “Dream” is on Bleecker Street.

Up on the stage, any minute now, Denny and the gang will be singing and playing “I Saw Her Again,” “Monday, Monday,” “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” The Village Gate will live again, will fade in, and fade out.

The Bitter End, the Figaro, the Café Wha?, the Kettle of Fish, the Dugout, the Hotel Albert, 10th Street and University—rattletrap home away from home for all the poor starving bastards of the 1950s and ‘60s, it’s condominiums now—they’ll all be there in the shadows, right around Denny, right around us.

Dream a little dream.