When Lincoln Center Festival productions go wrong – and “My Life as a Fairy Tale” goes very, very wrong – one consolation stems from the fact that it will all be over soon. The runs are usually very short, and by the time opening-night bows finished, this misbegotten fantasia on Hans Christian Andersen’s life and stories had completed a third of its performances. That means the talented individuals – which include the morose indie-pop wit Stephin Merritt, an all-female cast led by the fearless Fiona Shaw, and the intriguing young director Chen Shi-Zheng – can move on to more worthwhile material before the weekend is over.

Freighting Andersen’s life with alternately obscure and obvious psychology, and subjecting his stories to one-note interpretations, the creators have accomplished a surprising feat. They have turned a timeless writer whose spooky, ambiguous, almost Gothic tales enchant children and adults alike into a pretentious bore.

Mr. Chen has practically become a resident director for the festival, creating five different productions in the last seven years. At 20 hours, his 1999 “Peony Pavilion” made this year’s day-long “Le Dernier Caravanserail” look like a curtain-raiser. His subsequent festival works were all adaptations of Chinese works, some quite effective.

He signed up for this project (a co-production with the Hans Christian Andersen 2005 Foundation) after original director Deborah Warner gave up on it. The troubles encountered by Ms. Warner, possibly the most resourceful director working in theater today, should have been a warning.

Mr. Chen uses Erik Ehn’s disjointed pastiche of Andersen writings and imagined interior monologues (“The bear hears everything. The wind knows everything. Ding-dong!”) as a springboard for an even more disjointed torrent of material. A reluctant miniaturist, Mr. Chen is eager to find visual analogs to everything he hears; it’s as if he crammed a much longer evening’s worth of material into 75 minutes, regardless of whether it still fits.

Any resulting confusion is clearly the fault of the audience and not the tellers. As Ms. Shaw’s Andersen peremptorily states after one tale: “The story is over, and if you haven’t understood it, ask someone to explain it.”

Ms. Shaw dives into the trouser role of Andersen, preening about the stage and delivering his tales with the blustery aplomb of a 19th-century stage actor – which Andersen was, until he hit puberty and his soprano voice changed. But that confidence is easily shaken, whether through intimations that his stories are “just for kids,” allusions to his in different mother (played by Blair Brown), or references to Andersen’s uneasy relationships with Charles Dickens and Jenny Lind (frequent Chen collaborator Qian Yi). Mary Lou Rosato rounds out the cast.

Several visual motifs pop up throughout “Fairy Tale” – mermaids, eyes, birds, children’s toys. The most effective motif is the least intuitive one: Ms. Shaw uses origami to create everything from snowflakes to swords to teacups, even a lynching scene. One of the softest, most stirring moments comes when a character pulls dozens of paper hearts from Andersen’s chest.

The other theatrical coup is more complicated: Thanks to Peter Flaherty’s uncanny underwater projection and Christopher Akerlind’s superlative lighting, Mia Maestro (of television’s “Alias”) sings Mr. Merritt’s melancholy treatment of “The Little Robber Girl” seemingly from beneath the sea. Her crystalline voice, coupled with the exquisite stagecraft, makes for a haunting tableau – until Mr. Chen spoils it by overlaying gimmicky video footage of Ms. Maestro as a topless mermaid. This is one of several times where the lavish production budget works against the play’s interest. (There’s also a lot of needless flying through the air.)

Mr. Merritt has condensed about a dozen of Andersen’s fairy tales into woozy, Kurt Weill-through-the-looking-glass melodies. “The Little Robber Girl” is probably the strongest, although a story about a pen and inkwell jockeying for importance is charming. Even if his neo-vaudevillian lyrics don’t always land on the melody quite right (“bro-THERS,” “ad-ven-TURE”), Mr. Merritt writes well for his actresses’ varying singing abilities and has deftly arranged the songs for an Eastmeets-West quartet.

Elizabeth Caitlin Ward has created a wide array of oddball outfits for the onstage quintet. Still, it’s hard not to feel a twinge by the time Mr. Chen reaches Andersen’s tale of the emperor and his resplendent, nonexistent new clothes. Even with the characters’ ice skates, sackcloth, massive headgear, and stiletto-heeled swim flippers, not to mention what appears to be a bubble-wrap cape, “My Life as a Fairy Tale” isn’t wearing a stitch.

Until July 30 (Lincoln Center, 212-721-6500).