This show that weaves songs about the Big Easy, traditional standards of the South, fine-tuned tap dancing, and plenty of musical oomph is set into a framework that teeters in two ways.

One: It threatens to devolve into a big, unconditional kiss, the sort that the New Orleans Visitors and Convention Bureau would be happy to plant, although the folks there would know better than to take two hours to deliver it.

Two: It becomes rancidly sentimental, with a script that even throws God (or the absence of God, take your pick) into the city's devastation and becomes more maudlin as it develops a scant plot about two kids, both street dancers for coins, who lost their family in the flooding. And the ending is as goopy as a jambalaya left out overnight.

The truth part, which gives the whole thing its balance, comes in snippets of stories about the hurricane, the devastation, the many different betrayals of the city, and the ultimate will to rebuild it. Anyone who visited New Orleans in the months after the 2004 hurricane knows that these quick vignettes ring true. They are the foundations on which a city has determined to preserve its unique self, and to move forward.

Fire on the Bayou, written and directed by Kevin Ramsey, is being produced by the Delaware Theatre Company in Wilmington, where Ramsey's work has appeared before; he's at home on stage and as a director, writer, choreographer, and film and TV actor.

He assembled a classy, energetic cast - musician/actors Jeremy Cohen, Michael de Castro, and Chip Porter, plus the wonderfully husky-voiced Jannie Jones, the crowd-stirring Clinton Derricks-Carroll, and two youngsters who seem born for dancing, especially tap dancing. They are Tatiana Lofton, a student at Wilmington's Cab Calloway School of the Arts, and Paul "PJ" Pinkett, a seventh grader at the city's P.S. Dupont Middle School. One of the highlights of the show is Lofton's rendition of the soulful "When the Levee Broke."

The New Orleans that Ramsey gives us in Fire on the Bayou - which would be better off as a one-act or a shorter two-act - comes from the heart. But he pummels us with his love.

And so when the cast talks about the propensity some people have for "the seductive presence of voodoo," only in New Orleans "could death and darkness seem so appealing." (Go tell that to a Katrina victim.)

And "the people, the music, the traditions" are touted repeatedly late into the first act, and then on into the second. It's a bit much, but the cast keeps it going with 31 numbers (not counting reprises), some less than two minutes in length, all performed with brio. New Orleans continues on its way to viability, and tourists have returned. Music won't fix it. But as always in New Orleans, music - the music this show heralds - will define and electrify its unbridled spirit.

Fire on the Bayou

Presented by Delaware Theatre Company, 200 Water St., Wilmington, through Nov. 1. Tickets: $35-$49. Information: 302-594-1100 or www.delawaretheatre.org.