Imagine a musical about a small town in Louisiana in 1959—depressed farmers, sweet kids, ill-treated African Americans, a restless boy with a pompadour and a motorcycle, sinister evangelicals, and so on. Now imagine that musical written by Jim Steinman, the man who wrote and produced Bat out of Hell for Meat Loaf, and a past-his-prime Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Whistle Down the Wind (playing at 5th Avenue Theatre until Dec 2; see Get Out) is precisely what you’re imagining—technically accomplished but overwrought, nostalgic, and cloying. The band is dominated by a synth drum kit and four synthesizers, one of which, at intermission, was set to “timp/tbns/tbns & trpts.” Which is what Whistle Down the Wind sounds like: tbns and trpts. (The singers are better. Eric Kunze and Andrea Ross—as the fugitive and the oldest sister—have strong, dulcet voices.)

Based on a 1961 movie that was based on a 1958 novel, Whistle Down the Wind concerns three motherless children who find a wounded fugitive hiding in a barn. They think he’s Jesus; and he, looking for help wherever he can get it, doesn’t disabuse them of their fantasy. The kids in town come flocking to the tattooed Christ, the adults in town are looking for the fugitive, and everybody learns a little something about love and redemption and stuff.

Apparently, Whistle Down the Wind has been a hit in England in the last few years, where the Oxford Mail called it “a cracking feel-good family show” and the Wolverhampton AdNews ominously wrote, “No matter what they tell you, go and see this Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jim Steinman musical.” In 1998, one of its songs was recorded by an Irish quintet called Boyzone and went platinum. Some kinds of success are more damning than failure.