I’d never seen Pippin before. It’s a very strange show, but I was hoping at least to see someone being held upside-down hanging from a trapeze while singing No Time at All, ala Andrea Martin in her Tony award-winning performance in the 2013 Broadway revival, but that was wishful thing, although, just as in the Broadway productions, the song was a show stopper, this time performed by Kathleen Puls Andrade.

Pippin, or really, Pepin the Hunchback, was the eldest son of Charlemagne (Charles the Great), named after his grandfather Pepin the Short, in what can only be seen as a cruel generation-skipping continuation of family humor. He never played basketball.

With all the fun stuff of the wild and crazy 8th and early 9th centuries as background, this production cleverly mixes in aspects of current day news broadcasts, while maintaining its play within a play confusion where the protagonist searches, in both incarnations, for self-discovery, being too late to join the Knights of the Round Table in their much more entertaining quest for the Holy Grail a couple centuries earlier.

The plot aside, dancing carried the day, with complicated, high-energy movement generated by a dozen very fresh-looking faces and backed up by an excellent band. If there was any doubt that the original show was choreographed by Bob Fosse, that was removed in the scene the ensemble broke out the white gloves, but alas, no trapeze.