At Knott’s, One for the Environment : Stage: Rather than import another ice show, the theme park will stage a musical comedy focusing on save-the-planet issues.

Knott’s Berry Farm, which usually presents an ice show every summer, will take on a warmer setting this year with an original live musical comedy touching on a number of environmental issues.

“Peril on the Prairie,” a 35-minute show that opens in the Good Time Theatre on June 22 (previews begin May 25) and will run several times daily except Tuesday, revolves around a community of prairie dogs in an underground city, solar-powered by a system made from recycled refuse. Their leader is a resourceful female, Chris Wren, named for visionary English architect Christopher Wren; all the costumed prairie-dog characters 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. Even though the bird is their natural enemy, they 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-director-book author 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,” says 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 pre-packaged 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.”

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 says. “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” is sung almost entirely by an eight-member cast that includes Los Angeles Music Center Opera singer Scott Watanabe. Langley describes 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.”