You can serve it in a footed Waterford bowl and garnish it with garden-fresh wonders, but no amount of stirring will turn diluted pop into knockout punch. 13, a new Jason Robert Brown musical with book by Dan Elish, is now premiering at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum.

It is proof of three important ingredients: willingness by Center Theatre Group to spend money on new projects, inventiveness by the team of director Todd Graff, musical director David O and choreographer Michele Lynch, and the availability of American adolescents, talented beyond their years, who are willing and able to retro-fit into aging musical theater styles.

Beyond the performances and production quality, what is being served up, as the Beard of Avon might say, is a dish most chafing - especially if one has a hard time swallowing something some may find a little tasteless.

After Brown established himself with Songs for a New World (1995), he created 1999's historic Parade, a serious, critical-but-not-commercial success about bigotry.  He then gave us The Last Five Years, a less prickly but still clever bit of autobiography focused on the rise and fail of his marriage. 

By interspersing the couple's conflicting storylines as opposing timelines — his going forward, hers going back — he created a bittersweet Rashomon for modern relationships.  (Pasadena Playhouse gave it a great staging in 2006.)  All this certainly earned him a more blatant shot at commercial success, and that brings us to this pubescent Rent with Hoosiers in for the Bohemians.

13 springboards to life in a rousing opening number that introduces the basic theme of a fish (the soon-to-be-13 Jewish lad Evan) out of water (dropped from New York into Indiana).  This then segues into an ugly duckling tale of an awkward geek-boy wanting to hang with the beautiful kid-people.  While neither storyline is very interesting, they feel particularly thin with backing cardboard characters.

The unsettling aspect is the introduction of a terminally ill boy who has fallen off the geek-acceptability axis completely.  He deteriorates from crutches to wheelchair during the show, while the geek’s problem of attracting enough of an in-crowd to his Bar Mitzvah remains our primary concern.  Not that we need to rigidly align to some moral compass, and not that there isn't a character who tries to show Evan the shallowness of his ways, but there seems to be such a rush to the next dance number that nothing of substance lands before the denouement presumes we've all learned a valuable lesson.

What hearts the show wins — and there will be some — will be won by the performers.  The novelty here is having a stage full of actors, singers, dancers and musicians.  Not a single person on stage — and there are a lot of them — looks old enough to vote (except musical director David O). 

Brown’s music, while always bouncing and competent, feels stuck a generation back. He fills the house with hooks evocative of older songs. (This reviewer had Escape Club’s ‘Wild Wild West’ in his head afterwards.)  However, even if the songs aren’t interesting for the adults buying the tickets — and for whom the musical references will find more welcome reception — they offer plenty of chances for the youngsters to show off.