Knott’s Prairie Farm : Theme park: An original musical comedy with an environmental message will replace the usual ice show this summer.

BUENA PARK — The times they are a changin’ at Knott’s Berry Farm, where the usual summer ice show is giving way this year to “Peril on the Prairie,” an original musical comedy touching on a number of environmental and social issues.

The 35-minute show (previews begin May 25, and the regular run opens June 22 in the Good Time Theatre) revolves around prairie dogs that live in an underground city solar-powered by a system made from recycled refuse. Their leader is a resourceful female, Chris Wren, named for Christopher Wren, the visionary English architect; all the costumed prairie dogs are named for noted architects or engineers, an acknowledgement that real prairie dogs are considered natural environmental engineers.

As the plot unfolds, the critters discover a California condor egg perched precariously on a tree branch that is about to break off. Even though the bird is their natural enemy, the varmints persuade the condor father, whose mate has disappeared, that they can rescue the egg. Along the way there is also a romantic subplot about Chris Wren and a marmot named Digger O’Burrows.

Solar power? Recycling? Single fatherhood? In a show at that last bastion of escapism, the amusement park?

You bet, say the production’s creators, composer Jeff Langley and lyricist/book author/director Amanda McTigue. The pair have been writing theater songs, operas and other musical works together since 1978 and joined Knott’s Berry Farm last year as director of entertainment and manager of show development, respectively.

“I suppose there is escapism, but Knott’s is on the real end of the spectrum,” said Langley, 39, “where the opposite end, the ultimate, would be a glitzy Las Vegas show. We’re about real people here.”

Joe Meck, Knott’s vice president of entertainment and operations, said the decision not to import a prepackaged summer show this year has less to do with the recession--this production will cost about the same as an ice show to mount--than with a desire to use the park’s recently added in-house resources: namely Langley and McTigue.

In addition, Meck said, “this show can be reused. . . . In the long run, it becomes less expensive.”

Knott’s will still host some big-name entertainment: Jerry Lee Lewis performs May 25 and 26, and the Smothers Brothers appear July 5 and 6.

But in general, Langley said, “we’re much more interested in becoming builders, rather than buyers, of entertainment. Our designer, Tom Cluff, has spent three years building up our technical theatrical department here so we can do what we do. We want to cultivate our own company of actors.

“We envision a lot more street entertainment, a lot of vignettes, things on the midway that people can bump into, some of it surprising, all of it fun,” he added. “We want to give people real quality for their money,” he said.

McTigue and Langley bring unusual credits to their theme-park jobs. Langley has taught composition, music theory and analysis at the Juilliard School of Music. He was recruited after Knott’s president and CEO Terry Van Gorder contacted Juilliard and other arts institutions looking for high-caliber candidates for the entertainment director position; Langley also wrote songs and toured with singer Holly Near as her musical director.

McTigue, a Yale graduate who majored in philosophy, had extensive acting credits in New York’s avant-garde and Off Off Broadway theaters as well as regional stage productions, and she has written two children’s plays. She and Langley created a production and publishing company, and two years ago they produced a celebrity-studded AIDS benefit at Carnegie Hall.

The atypical nature of the show also reflects McTigue’s previous lack of exposure to theme parks; at 37, she had never visited one before the Knott’s job possibility arose and views her inexperience as an asset.

“I’m not seeing this theme park through nostalgic eyes, as many people do,” she said. “I look at: What could it be? How does a theme park compare to other things?. . . . ‘Peril on the Prairie’ is visually strong and rooted in story and a sense of character. That’s also what great theater is, and there’s no reason that a theme park shouldn’t have a show that reflects that.”

McTigue and Langley consider their work primarily in theatrical terms, to the point of viewing Knott’s less as a traditional theme park than as one big theatrical stage. “What I really can’t stand in theme parks is the mall-show mentality,” Langley said. “I think people deserve to see Broadway-show quality. They don’t have the time or interest to see a 2 1/2-hour show, but we want to give them 30 minutes of entertainment, of real singing, not lip-syncing.”

To that end, “Peril on the Prairie,” which will run several times daily except Tuesdays, is sung almost entirely by an eight-member cast that includes Los Angeles Music Center Opera singer Scott Watanabe. Langley described his score as “somewhat eclectic but with strong roots in the Leonard Bernstein tradition, mixed with the best of the golden age of theater music, such as Richard Rodgers. There are some shades of Kurt Weill irony, though, in the background.”

Not that the show strays completely from conventional theme park values. “There is a lot of (Steven) Spielberg, a lot of warm, simple, tender American sentiment mixed with American archetypes,” Langley noted. “The show has lots of layers of meaning. On the one hand, it’s a pure, simple family show that’s very visual and has lots of action--the stage turns 180 degrees, and there is interaction with the audience--but on the other hand it goes to deeper levels, too. But if you were from Czechoslovakia and didn’t know English, you could enjoy it just because it’s so visual.”

“Peril on the Prairie” is one of four summer musical shows that McTigue and Langley are putting together. All are all rooted in some degree of reality. “At Twilight: An Evening Musicale,” which opens in the Bird Cage Theatre on May 4 for weekend performances and begins a daily schedule June 22, tells of the 1912 Twilight Society of the Ladies of Greater Buena Park, who celebrate the light bulb, phonograph, iron and other new inventions of the era.

“The Honeymoon Trailer Radio Hour” imitates a live Depression-era radio broadcast. It opens June 29 in the Cloud 9 Theatre. And “Saralinda’s Barnyard Circus,” opening June 22 in Calico Square, takes a bored 1930s girl off of a Dust Bowl farm and into a Victorian circus. That show in turn kicks off a circus parade complete with reproductions of 10 turn-of-the-century circus wagons built on a commission from Knott’s in Peru, Ind., home of the Circus Hall of Fame.