The new off-Broadway musical “Sidd” is made in the image of a Disney Broadway hit: It has a plot that a child can grasp, a whiff of the exotic, “lite” pop songs, corny jokes, and a physically appealing cast. But as earnestly as “Sidd” tries to reach box office nirvana, it can’t pull off the Disney formula. Sure, it lacks the big-budget production values and the massive theater. But more crucially, “Sidd” lacks that sureness of touch, that unerring instinct that can turn thin material and forgettable songs into potent mass market entertainment.

The unlikely inspiration for “Sidd” is Herman Hesse’s 1922 road-to-enlightenment novel, “Siddhartha.” Apart from the fact that many theatergoers had to read it in high school, “Siddhartha” would seem to have little to recommend it as the subject of a musical revue. Siddhartha, you may recall, begins his journey as a hard-core ascetic in a loincloth, starving himself and standing for hours in the rain. Then there’s his worldly phase: a luxurious house, an expensive prostitute, a gambling addiction. He even contemplates suicide, but instead becomes a ferryman, carrying passengers back and forth for all eternity.

Most would find it problematic to envision the snappy musical numbers that might accompany such a journey, but not Doug Silver (who wrote the music) and Andrew Frank (who wrote the book, directed, and collaborated with Mr. Silver on the lyrics). Messrs. Silver and Frank neatly dispatch all problems of tone.Their solution? They simply refuse to take the story seriously.

“Are you the mystics?” a character asks. “Mm-hmm,” a mystic replies, segueing into the super-simplified ballad “Let It Go.” The sequence of the ascetics teaching Sidd their ancient rituals is one big joke; they say “Feel the heron, be the heron” and Sidd cracks, “Got it! What next?” And when the no-longer-ascetic Sidd gets to the big city, the lovely, sultry Mala seems not in the least like a hardened prostitute as she coos, “Come on over to the happy shop.”

Dramatically speaking, there ought to be tension and release in giving up a life of self-inflicted deprivation for a purely materialistic existence – and again later, when Sidd gives up the pleasures of the flesh for the meditative life.But these tensions all but disappear in Mr. Frank’s production. Sidd seems to bounce from place to place, his troubles dissipating quickly, accompanied for the most part by an upbeat track.

“Sidd” has the kind of inconsistencies that make audiences uncomfortable. It’s a depressing story full of chirpy tunes and platitudes. We’re supposed to be in India – then a reggae song starts urging folks to chill out. Siddhartha wants to go to bed with a prostitute, but he’s singing, “You’re gonna teach me how to lose myself in love.” The setting is clearly in the past, yet there are J.Lo and eBay jokes.

“Sidd” finds its greatest onstage joy in extended musical sequences about what it takes to work at a job and the temptations of the big city.These diversions are much longer than they need to be, given their significance in the plot, but you can tell the writers are having fun. It’s clear, finally, that the minds behind “Sidd” prefer pleasure to enlightenment, hard pavement to “the river that is always moving, yet is always here.”

“Sidd” is so thoroughly Western that by the end, it feels silly to bother with his big spiritual revelations (“We are never going anywhere / We are always on the way”).The writers and the crowd are firmly on the side of Sidd’s son, who wants to leave dad’s boring ferryboat for the big city. For that matter, the audience has been out of step with Sidd from the start – they have much more in common with the villagers who don’t like smelly beggars than the longhaired ascetics.

“Sidd” doesn’t even attempt to get its audience to walk around in Siddhartha’s shoes, staying always outside the story and its emotions. At the end of the day, “Sidd” is not remotely interested in opening one’s mind to different spiritual and philosophic paths. Here Eastern philosophy is used as flavor, in the way that so many musicals put their thoroughly American characters into foreign costumes and settings to get a hint of the exotic.

By declining to get into the particulars,”Sidd” ends up presenting Eastern religion as a cross between New Age spirituality and the serenity prayer.

For all that, there are some who will enjoy hearing talented singers with Broadway credits belt through a stack of agreeable songs, mainly knockoffs of classic genre tunes. The acting is not as good as the singing – overly bright, almost as if the actors were playing animated characters – but there isn’t much of it, just a few lines of script between the songs. And despite a big, muscular finish, “Sidd” can’t pull together as a coherent whole. Like Hesse’s Siddhartha, it’s just too conflicted.

Open run (340 W. 50th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, 212-239-6200).