In Storyville, everything’s for sale: booze, drugs, the flesh, the soul. All you need is your dancing shoes, a little fast cash and a lot of desire. Conscience? That’s optional.

Joyelle Cabato (photo credit Daren Scott)

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Into the red-light district of New Orleans, circa 1917, comes Butch “Cobra” Brown, a newly minted dreamer who’s given up on his prizefighting past, taken up the trumpet and plans on becoming the best horn player on the planet, never mind the Big Easy. What goes down on his quest is anything but easy, and that’s the story of “Storyville,” the lusty and vivacious musical written in the late ‘70s by Ed Bullins with music and lyrics by Mildred Kayden (both were in attendance opening night). The show has been revised by director Ken Page for the San Diego Repertory Theater.

But Butch’s isn’t the only story. There’s sultry singer Tigre Savoy, who croons for a living at one of Storyville’s houses of prostitution while yearning for a better life for herself and her little boy, Georgie. There’s Hot Licks Sam, the perennial king of horn players in Storyville, who feels the uneasy weight of his crown when Butch arrives and, more deeply, the shame and anger self-inflicted by submitting to white fat cat Mayor Mulligan. There’s madam Countess Willie, proprietor of prostitutes, whose title is as false as her tower of red hair. And there’s one of her girls, Fifi, who plays at love while she aches for the real thing and who recurringly regards the seamy life around her through bitter tears.

That’s one bodacious bowl of gumbo.

Throw in 30 musical numbers (some more fully realized than others), lively choreography and the infectious jazz of the early 20^th century and you won’t have room for dessert.

This San Diego Rep reimagination of Bullins’ show, which was last produced locally at UCSD in 1977, is a visual spectacle on the Lyceum Stage, with sensational costumes by Jeanne Reith, from the weeds of the marching funeral band to the skin-baring frills of the red light district to the Mardi Gras masks and outfits worn at the opening of the second act. The presence on stage (mostly concealed) and performance of a crack band led by William Foster McDaniel also serves to transport you to another time and place.

The flow of the production is uneven, however. The first act drags a bit, particularly in the unfolding of the inevitable courtship of Tigre (Natalie Wachen) by Butch (Alvester Martin III), while the action comes fast and furious in Act 2: Mardi Gras, the grand horn contest, a doomed boxing match in which a sailor is murdered, an over-the-top voodoo spell cast by Mama Cecelyn Lascar (DeBorah Sharpe-Taylor). The flurry of drama – and melodrama – isn’t a problem in itself, but you wish the earlier part of the show could have moved at this pace.

The horn playing, both from Hot Licks Sam (Victor Morris, who seemed to be doing his own blowing) and from the stage band, is rousing. The best of the musical numbers – “Big Time Ballyhood Band,” “Feel that Jazz,” “Rollin’ Up the River,” the ironical “Makin’ It,” the gospel-tinged “The Best Is Yet To Be” – propel rather than slow the storytelling, though there are a few (how can there not be, with a book this voluminous?) that achieve the opposite.

Wachen, a member of the swing and jazz trio the Manhattan Dolls, possesses a lovely voice, but she’s almost too ladylike (with her elegant chignon and lacy pastel gowns) to be believable as one who sings, even reluctantly, in a whorehouse. Martin’s Butch has the required swagger and physicality (his stage-fighting is top-notch), though his vocalizing is no match for Wachen’s. The two are also at the mercy of an ill-conceived shouting sequence set to discordant music following a moment when Tigre discovers Butch in the arms of a drunken Fifi.

Speaking of Fifi, long-legged Chondra Profit all but walks away with (and maybe dances away with) the show, bringing alternating doses of insouciance, spite and pathos to her character. You almost wish she’d haul off and let the too-perfect Tigre have one.