Some of the most thrilling minutes you'll spend at the New York Musical Theatre Festival this year are to be found at the very start of The Calico Buffalo, which concludes its run tomorrow. Performers clad in contemporary dress slowly bleed onto the stage, adopting new costume pieces with each uttered lyric: now a skin jacket, now a fur cloak, now a horned helmet. Parallel lines of people slowly twist and collide until they've formed an undulating circle of humanity that fills the stage while building, almost beneath your field of vision, a frontier outpost replete with giant hide parasols that are as distinctive as they are protective. It's about the creation of not just a community, but a theatrical language that you can't wait to sample at more extravagant length.

Be careful what you wish for. Though director Craig J. George and choreographer Billy Sprague Jr. have worked something of a miracle with this opening number, "Day of All Days," they never even approach its near-perfect realization again. What initially promises to be an absorbing thesis on imagination and the impact of oral history on even our modern, Internet-addicted souls, with all the vividity and cleverness of Julie Taymor's work on The Lion King, soon becomes just another show that feels far more interested in being impressed with itself than in engaging the family audiences it ostensibly courts.

E.J. Stapleton has provided the libretto, which is based on his own children's book, about a young buffalo named Bora-Boh (Zachary Infante) who must cope with being different. Whereas the others in his pack are a uniform, rich brown, he's white with black and orange spots, a difference that both taunts the day's overriding superstition and threatens to arouse the appetite of the nearby wolves who are always looking for their next dinner. His parents, the local chief (Rhys Gilyeat) and his wife (Rachel Rhodes-Devey), protect him and themselves by dressing him in mud every day, a gambit that works until the jealous Thorn (Max Wilcox), who wants to inherit the chief's crown himself, finds out about it and schemes to get Bora-Boh out of the way forever.

There are plenty of good lessons for young kids here—about individuality, identity, jealousy, and so on. The treatment, however, is astonishingly heavy and dark, with enormous chunks of scenes devoted to persecution, terror, and fear, and a resolution that, though expectedly upbeat (if unrealistically so), can't wipe away everything that comes before. What's more, because the running time is nearly two hours, you (to say nothing of children) are steeping in this stuff for a long time, and the writing is not sufficient to make the endurance test worthwhile. Except for "Day of All Days" and the minor but deliciously tribal "Anthem of the Nation," the songs (which Stapleton wrote with Peter Stopschinski) are nothing special in terms of either composition or their relationship to the story.

Aside from Brooke Shapiro, whose reading of Bora-Boh's toad buddy Bittle would be excruciatingly excessive if viewed from the last row of Radio City Music Hall's third mezzanine, the performers hit the right notes musically and dramatically. Infante is endearing as Bora-Boh, and Gilyeat and Rhodes-Devey compelling as his loving-but-concerned parents. Wilcox and Rachel Coloff, who plays a role akin to the village's prophetic shaman, are also quite good in their roles. And the five-piece band, led by musical director Jesse Warkentin, nicely sets and maintains a fable-like atmosphere throughout.

That needs to come from more than just the band, though—it should be infused in every second of the show. "Day of All Days" suggests that's where the evening is going, but it doesn't make it all the way. The Calico Buffalo could get there, but first it, like its namesake, needs to decide what it is and what it wants to be. There's no reason it can't, provided it receives the reconceiving and judicious cutting that might reveal a lean, tight piece buried beneath the bloat.

The Calico Buffalo
at The New York Musical Theatre Festival 2015
Tickets online, Venue and Performance Schedule: The New York Musical Theatre Festival 2015 Guide and Tickets