WHEN "Pippin" emerged on Broadway in 1972, it had at least two factors working like gangbusters to put it across: a fresh, folky score by Stephen Schwartz and a Bob Fosse staging so overtly sexy that audiences needed a smoke afterward.
A restaging by Goodspeed Musicals aims to recapture those qualities and discover new ones besides, but in the touring production's only West Coast stop, at the Orange County Performing Arts Center's Segerstrom Hall, it's like a neon marquee harnessed to a 6-volt battery: It just can't draw enough juice to flicker to life.
When introduced five months ago at Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn., this production, directed by Gabriel Barre, distinguished itself on a couple of points: the casting of a truly fresh-faced actor, Joshua Park, to play the show's young, searching-for-himself hero, and the inclusion of flashy magic tricks and a few Cirque du Soleil-style acrobatics to lend mystery and wonder to the proceedings.
The production also incorporated a number of tweaks made through the years to the officially licensed Roger O. Hirson book and Schwartz music and lyrics, including a twist at the end that poises the search-for-fulfillment theme to be repeated by the next generation. Los Angeles witnessed most of these changes when Reprise! presented the show two years ago.
Of course, presentations of "Pippin" nowadays also come with a built-in curiosity factor: Can foreshadowing of Schwartz's "Wicked" score be heard here? The answer is: yes and no. "Pippin" sounds very much of its time. It's joyously infectious, in a James Taylor-ish way, rather than exploding with the contemporary Broadway-pop pyrotechnics of the 2003 "Wizard of Oz" prequel.
The production begins with a magic trick. Stagehands, at work on a deceptively bare-looking stage, stack four traveling trunks atop a handcart, creating a magic cabinet, from which emerges the show's Leading Player (Andre Ward), dressed in a flashy, red-velvet tailcoat.
Well, that's fun, we think at first. Yet the show's energy barely reaches the lip of the stage, let alone extending beyond.
The rest of the players -- exercise-sculpted, in barely there costumes -- emerge from the shadows, soon followed by the central character: Pippin (Park), firstborn son of Charles I, 8th century king of the Franks, known as Charlemagne.
