It’s all fun, but pretty unrelated to what should be the show’s central dramatic question. Instead of drawing closer and closer to Winnie and her world, we get a bunch of busy, vaudevillian stuff about a fair, a flashy villain and a pair of comic detectives. Moreover, her dilemma about whether or not to drink is essentially internal and solitary (she’s the only one that faces it), and internal dilemmas confronted in isolation are not something that big, brassy musicals depict particularly well. I never quite understood why Winnie wouldn’t just take a gulp - eternal life in the show certainly has its drawbacks and challenges, but they seem pretty minor in comparison to the woes of dreary mortality. In a musical, there should be some significant emotion shared between audience and characters if all that singing and high kicking is to mean something. It’s overall a pretty appealing show, cleverly staged, swiftly moving, slick and entertaining, but it still lacks a crucial sense of enchantment. The world-premiere musical with Broadway ambitions is based on the 40-year-old but eternally assigned young adult novel Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt. The youngest son, Jesse (Andrew Keenan-Bolger), has been 17 for about a century, and in the first act of the new musical Tuck Everlasting, onstage at Alliance Theatre through February 22, his secret is discovered by the story’s protagonist, the appealingly clever and determined Winnie (Sarah Charles Lewis), an ordinary girl with a stultifying home life who is charmed by the glamorous, devil-may-care, bohemian lifestyle of the Tucks and is tempted to take a swig from the magic spring herself. (I forget why, but the Tucks feel they can’t share their special spring water.) They have to split up and move around every so often or else they’d have a lot to explain to the neighbors. They’ve found they must keep their distance from ordinary folk. Long ago, they all took big gulps from the fountain of youth, located, of all places, in a forest in New Hampshire. The “Tuck” in the title Tuck Everlasting is the name of a family - the Tucks: mother, father and two sons - and they are indeed everlasting.

Tuck Everlasting and the roads not taken.

Tuck everlasting picture