“Next to Normal” may be the first musical about bipolar disorder. It also boasts what is probably the only musical number in which a woman receives electroshock treatment in front of a wall covered in light bulbs.

Given all that, the unoriginality of “Next to Normal” is astonishing. There is little in Second Stage’s latest offering that hasn’t been done, and miles better. Tom Kitt’s score consists mainly of average melodies drenched in orchestration. But he’s got nothing on Brian Yorkey, whose clichéd book and lyrics include refrains like “I wish I could fly,” “There’s a light in the dark,” and “It only hurts when I breathe.”

“I miss the mountains,” sings the heavily-medicated Diana (Alice Ripley), a housewife in the midst of a decades-old battle with bipolar disorder. Mountains? Oh, you mean those things some people call manic episodes. Well, this is not a musical for those people. This is a musical for people who don’t mind watching Alice being advanced like a pawn to prove that what bipolar people really need is to be left alone.

Yes, alone. Alice, we learn, does not need medications, talk therapy, or even the support of her staggeringly loyal husband, Dan (an underutilized Brian d’Arcy James). What she needs, we’re told, is to make it on her own.

Yet after watching Alice battle her frightening emotions for the better part of two hours, it’s hard to applaud the idea of her going it alone. The one thing Michael Grief’s production gets right is the panicky feeling of distress that underscores Alice’s existence.

But unlike, say, “Spring Awakening,” where the characters’ acute anxieties are used to pulsating rock-and-roll effect, “Next to Normal” doesn’t know how to tap in — musically or otherwise — to Alice’s scary energy. It’s as if the show wants to be subversive, but can’t get past its conventional methods. Aesthetically, it thinks it’s hip when it’s not, a state of things that is vaguely embarrassing.

Mr. Grief’s rock-concert staging doesn’t help the cause. Mark Wendland’s massive set boasts a three-level catwalk across which the band members are dispersed; on glass panels, pixilated black-and-white dots sketch the contours of a white Colonial — and Diana’s large, looming eyes, displayed like a pop art banner above the proceedings. The volume of the atmosphere feels awfully loud for such a quiet, internal story. And there are times — the electroshock treatment number being the most blatant example — when the whole enterprise of setting a woman’s struggles with psychopharmacology to a soft-rock score feels in poor taste.

Not surprisingly, the concert backdrop feels most natural behind the show’s teenaged characters. Diana and Dan’s daughter Natalie (Jennifer Damiano) is a rigid honor student who turns to drugs as Mom’s condition worsens. Natalie’s story — she’s a classical pianist who has to learn to improvise — is an unbroken chain of clichés. But Ms. Damiano delivers them with age-appropriate angst, doing her best with some wooden lines.

More unfortunate is Aaron Tveit, who gets stuck playing Gabe, a figment of Mom’s addled imagination. Gabe, short for Gabriel (the angel, get it?), is the teenage version of Diana’s beloved son, who died in infancy. He stalks Diana from an upper catwalk, singing “I’m alive, I’m alive!” and refusing to be grieved and forgotten.

There is something garish about Diana’s illness being personified by a malevolent, scheming version of her dead son, an aggressive little demon who encourages her to commit suicide. Then again, “Next to Normal” is not overly concerned with good taste. This is a show about mental illness in which a doctor rips off his scrubs like a stripper and a woman gets electroshock therapy on a catwalk under strobe lights (its original title was “Feeling Electric”). Maybe those over-the-top elements could have worked in a musical that was smart and sophisticated, but “Next to Normal” is neither.