I can question like: What is it?

If you just chanted, "Verb, you're so demanding," then you're probably in your late 30s or early 40s.  I'm referring, of course, to a lyric from the most dynamic installment of Schoolhouse Rock!, a series of edu-taining cartoon shorts aired between Saturday morning commercials in the 1970s on ABC.  The series' heyday was between 1973 and 1980, but new episodes appeared into 1996, and reruns continued until 1999.  Ad exec David McCall created the series after noticing his son struggled with multiplication tables yet knew the lyrics to every song on the radio.  Bob Dorough, a jazz composer who worked with Miles Davis, wrote and performed the debut song, "Three Is a Magic Number."  Multiplication Rock was soon followed by cartoon videos that explained grammar, American history, science, computers, economics and (for the 2009 DVD set) ecology.  Other singer-songwriters included Lynn Ahrens, who later wrote the music for Once on This Island, Ragtime and Seussical the Musical.  To this day, many of my fellow gen-Xers and I are able to sing the Preamble to the Constitution courtesy of the series, as long as we remember to add the omitted phrase, "of the United States."

Theatrebam Chicago, a troupe whose first presentation was a one-man biography of Charles Manson, compiled and premiered Schoolhouse Rock Live! which played to eight months of sold-out houses.  I say "compiled" because there's very little original writing in this jukebox musical; its few dozen spoken lines are mostly eye-roll-inducing connective beats amounting to little more than, "Hey, that reminds me of another song!" In Olympia Family Theater's production, running two more weekends in the Kenneth J. Minnaert Black Box at South Puget Sound Community College, Tim Goebel plays Tim Goebel, an educator so ill-prepared to teach grade school it's slipped his mind that women were ever denied the vote.  That's OK, because first-day jitters and a fortuitous sighting of Schoolhouse Rock explode his frazzled superego into seven singing incarnations of lessons from the series.  I'd always heard the scripted dialogue was atrocious, and it rarely disappoints.

But who cares?  If you're my age, the show may as well be a sing-along.  I know almost every lyric.  (That's helpful, because without mikes, it was often impossible to make out the words.)  OFT's staging of "Figure Eight," in which the "circle that turns ‘round upon itself" is demonstrated via gymnastic ribbons, soap bubbles and a madly grinning Kim Holm on roller skates, is delightful.  If only the rest of the show were staged as creatively.  First-time director Christina Collins banks on nostalgia and seven talented voices to carry the show, but it soon feels thinly produced (fancy concert lighting excepted).  Five members of the cast, plus its director and musical director, just closed The Brain From Planet X a week ago, so it stands to reason that Schoolhouse could've used another week of rehearsal.  More than once on opening night, actors appeared uncertain about lyrics and choreography.  Details like juggled props and an incongruously hoodie-clad stagehand, capped by a conclusion that defines anticlimax, seem insufficiently imagined.  "The Great American Melting Pot" would've played more convincingly if the cast weren't an all-white fondue.  Happily, Bruce Haasl sails through the Busta Rhymes-level difficulty of "Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla" without batting an eye, and Lauren O'Neill's warm voice and calm presence smooth a number of wrinkles.

I wanted to admire this production as much as I enjoyed its game cast and 20 familiar songs.  Unfortunately, the unprofessional staging elicited more "eek" interjections than wows.

Schoolhouse Rock Live!

Through June 6, 7 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 3 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. $8-$15
SPCCC - Kenneth J. Minnaert Black Box, 2011 Mottman Road SW, Olympia
360.753.8586