The musical, a theatrical genre associated with Broadway, has in recent years stretched to accommodate a wide range of themes besides boy meets girl. Today, witches, Bombay dancers, vampires, puppets and the city of Brooklyn are all subjects of musicals in New York City. And they are immensely successful – to such a degree that it’s clear that the musical form can handle more than happily-ever-after story lines.

A new musical version of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” which played to a fidgety youthful house Friday at the Maine Center for the Arts, returns to a more traditional style of boy meets girl (Tom and his schoolmate Becky Thatcher) as well as one of the best-known beloved narratives in American literary history.

Commissioned by the Kennedy Center’s Imagination Celebration project in Washington, the one-hour musical was conceived and written by Ken Ludwig (“Lend Me a Tenor”) with music and lyrics by award-winning songwriter Don Schlitz. The script follows the essence of Tom’s plucky story closely and, in places, capitalized on the cornball cleverness of Mark Twain.

Overmiking sometimes obscured both spoken and sung words, but the young audience giggled at Tom and Becky’s sweet flirtations, worried about their captivity in McDougal’s Cave and cheered Huck Finn’s witty insights. The music wasn’t exactly memorable and the choreography was knee-slappingly simple, but both were upbeat and bubbly. At its best – and at its worst – the show may have made some in the audience want to return to the original novel.

Performances by the six-person cast were also high-spirited, and they manipulated the set of moveable boxes with alacrity – to create caves, a one-room schoolhouse, Tom’s whitewashed wall, a graveyard and the town itself.

Danny Tippett’s Tom and Amy Sheff’s Becky brought spunky childlike energy to the stage. Janet Patton’s two roles of Aunt Polly and Widow Douglas were alternately shrill and kind-hearted. And Phillip Olarte’s Injun Joe was as threatening as his Rev. Sprague was evangelical.

Director Nick Olcott stretched Twain’s story by casting Steven Joseph, who is black, in the role of Huck Finn. While some may have bristled at the idea of tampering with a tale so ingrained imaginatively in its original form, the alteration added another dimension to Huck’s character, one that is as deeply American in its own way as Huck’s original characterization in the book. It’s a testament to Twain’s masterpiece that contemporary artists see its elastic potential.