Punk musical Hard Core Logo: Live is more live than hardcore

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Punk rock, Iggy Pop once said, was a term used by "dilettantes and heartless manipulators about music that takes up the energies, the bodies, the hearts, the souls, the time and the minds of young men who give everything they have to it." He meant that "punk" was an insulting description – an affront to the scruff artists and safety-pin set of the Blitzkrieg Bop generation.

(Iggy Pop also claimed he didn't use his toilet. "I almost always pee in the yard or the garden," the I Wanna Be Your Dog singer claimed, "because I like to pee on my estate." Now, that's punk. And I mean that in the most admiring way.)

All to say that punk as a musical form hasn't always gotten its due respect.

Which brings us to Hard Core Logo: Live, Michael Scholar's stage adaptation of Michael Turner's poetic, well-respected book Hard Core Logo from 1993 and Bruce McDonald's equally well-respected 1996 mockumentary of the same name.

The story as presented in this rambunctious but skimpy production involves the fictitious four-piece punk crew Hard Core Logo on a short reunion tour through Western Canada after an ugly breakup six years prior. Stops include "Deadmonton" and the Saskatchewan city that "rhymes with fun."

The action of the play is the road trip – a tour fraught by past issues, specifically the complicated relationship of the band's founders and friends-since-boyhood Joe Dick (the singer) and Billy Tallent (the flash guitarist). Segments in a touring van and motels are interspersed with live, rowdy performances by the band, starting with the thrashing Rock 'n' Roll is Fat and Ugly.

The first concert is a fundraiser for Bucky Haight, Dick's idol. As Dick tells it, Haight lost a leg – or is it both legs? – in a shooting accident. The show is a success, which spurs the ensuing reunion jaunt.

Hard Core Logo: Live, originally produced in Edmonton in 2010 and at Vancouver's PuSh Festival a year later, is presented by the independent non-profit company BFL Theatre in Toronto upstairs at Lee's Palace, a suitably grungy club where music equipment cases and Suicidal Tendencies stickers look right in place. Small television sets to the sides of the stage carry live images here and on-the-road montages there.

But while the edgy performances and staging evoke a long-gone electric-and-leather era, the characters are given little room to breathe. Dick (played by Al Nolan) is a self-sabotaging cocaine abuser; Tallent (Andrew Fleming) is a recovering boozer; John Oxenberger (Michael Dufays) is a thoughtful, journal-writing bassist with a lithium prescription; drummer Pipefitter (Thomas Scott) needs money to get him and his garbage-hauling business out of the dumps.

The characters are presented as is. We don't get too deep into them. So, when things go sideways, it's hard to give a damn about them. We have issues of dependency, rape and suicide – not to mention the subject of punk music as a pop-cultural phenomenon – that receive only fleeting consideration.

Hard Core Logo: Live is entertaining (if occasionally silly; the acid-trip scene was pure spoof), and scene-stealer Jennifer Walls is fun in a variety of the roles she plays. Ultimately, however, beyond its rugged charm, the production is under-nourishing and puzzlingly lacking in intensity.

Nolan, as Joe Dick, spits a lot – a punk thing. The audience clapped heartily at the end of the show, but that's not punk. The respectful thing to do would have been to spit back. Maybe Hard Core Logo: Live hadn't worked up their hard-core juices.

Hard Core Logo: Live continues to March 26 (hardcorelogolive.com).