STAGE : Artistic success doesn’t always breed complacency. Playwright-Director George C. Wolfe, right, is taking another look at his exuberant musical about jazzman Jelly Roll Mortonfor a possible trip to New York after its record-breaking L.A. run : Will ‘Jelly’ Keep Rolling on Broadway?

Like a song with a false ending, “Jelly’s Last Jam” is not quite over.

The show may have broken all previous records for an eight-week run at the Mark Taper Forum before shutting down on schedule April 21, but that was hardly the end. Whatever one’s thoughts on George C. Wolfe’s exuberant musical about jazzman Jelly Roll Morton, one thing was always predictable: a Broadway future.

According to Wolfe and producer Margo Lion, Jujamcyn Theatres has come aboard as a co-producer, Wolfe has taken a couple of second looks at the show, a meeting of the collaborative team is set for June to discuss changes, and a low-profile reworking of the piece is planned for the fall.

Assuming all this goes off on schedule--and you can just about bet on that--it could be Broadway in the spring for “Jelly.”

Why not? Warts and all, “Jelly’s Last Jam” is one of the more forceful and engrossing musicals to have come down the pike in a long time. It also happens not to be several things: it is not a “black” musical encompassing a dated and demeaning white man’s vision of African-American life (“Porgy and Bess,” “Show Boat”); it is not a celebration of gospel (“Dont Bother Me I Cant Cope” and countless less prominent successors); it is not an all-song, all-dance revue, such as “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” or “Blues in the Night.”

It is , on the other hand, a not-entirely-flattering book musical about Creole jazz composer Morton (a.k.a. Jelly or the Roll and played by Obba Babatunde) by an unencumbered African-American playwright-director who knows how to bring irony as well as purpose to the portrait--and does it with complexity, imagination and flair, mostly using Morton’s own music.

Wolfe, who wrote “The Colored Museum,” a clever skewering of self-generated black stereotypes that not all persons of color were sure they appreciated, is still young enough at 36 that the collegiate side of him often percolates to the surface.

It was much in evidence in some of the more impudent aspects of “Colored Museum.” And it’s in evidence in “Jelly’s Last Jam” in his use of the shadowy Mephistophelean messenger, the Chimney Man, modeled after Baron Samedi, a trickster figure in Haitian voodoo, whose traditional silhouette in cutaway coat and top hat reminded Wolfe, he said, of New Orleans chimney sweeps. (Had it not been for the impressive Keith David in the role, it would have come across as even more of a youthful cliche than it is.)

We examined Jelly’s life through his death: Jelly is dying but won’t believe it; Chimney Man challenges him to take a good, hard look at his actions and the events that shaped them--and believe it. As cliches, go, this one is cloaked in a certain eloquence, which helps, but also in rhymed couplets, which doesn’t.

The couplets may be gone in the revised editions, says Wolfe, but the Chimney Man character, who may be modified, is unlikely to disappear since he underpins the plot. Both are part of a sluggish beginning that Wolfe says he wants to rethink.

“You reduce ideas to geometric equations,” he volunteered about the experience of doing a musical. “If it works, the emotion comes back. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. My feeling,” he said after taking an early second look at the show, “is that Act II has its own intrinsic rules. Act I is a good, smart musical, but doesn’t have its own rules yet.

“I want to try to re-examine Jelly’s transformation from a human being into an icon. I’d like to focus some energies on the point where art and hype become one and the same, and Jelly starts believing that his gifts come from him. There’s a theatrical way of telling a story that I don’t feel I’ve quite achieved.”

Wolfe’s self-assessment is encouraging for the show’s future. There is work to be done. But it leaves out the show’s many strengths, especially the primary one: Wolfe’s unhesitating embrace of stereotypes, verbal bugaboos and other unmentionables, the better to explode them. “Dr. Jazz,” an arresting mock-minstrel show that ends Act I, for instance, is a rousing display of ironic self-revilement.

It climaxes a scene in which Jelly, who historically denied his blackness (“no coon blood in this Creole”), tries to humiliate his partner, Jack the Bear, whom he suspects of having an affair with his lover, Anita.

The symbolic gauntlet in this duel is a doorman’s red coat, emblem of slavery, which Jelly puts on when the insulted Jack rejects it. The act ends with the liveried Jelly fronting a mincing chorus line in blackface masks doing a biting sendup of the worst and most classic stereotyping.

“It’s not completely successful yet,” says Wolfe, who plans to refine the scene, “but it’s a reflection of Jelly’s dementia, which is a reflection of our own--a chorus of coons in some twisted mirroring of Jelly’s denial and self-exoneration. It’s mocking the source to serve the inventor. It’s its own mutant form. Inside the buoyance, it reflects a complicated culture.”

That kind of magnification turned upon itself is the element in Wolfe’s art that has proved unsettling to black and white audiences alike. In this he inherits a tradition that began in the first quarter of the century with the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, ahead of their time, were among the earliest black writers in this century to recognize not only the poetic but the anthropological value of black vernacular as language. They lived it and flaunted it as a kind of deliberate--and largely benevolent--self-satire.

The revolutionary black writers of the ‘60s, on the other hand--notably Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Ed Bullins--jumped on black American with a vengeance. It was a language they could claim as their own and which suited their virulent expressions of seething discontent, reflecting the radical emotions of the time.

Such plays as Baraka’s well-known “Dutchman” and “The Toilet,” or Bullins’ “The Taking of Miss Janie” (perhaps the most unsettling of his works) were designed to shock. They were explicit warnings about loss of cultural identity that they believed had the power to destroy black Americans as long as they conformed to white society. But anger in the theater burns itself up. It’s less durable than satire. The plays, which remain symbolically important, did not travel well into the more complacent late ‘70s and ‘80s.

Wolfe, who broadly dramatized a handful of Hurston stories in 1989 from her “Spunk” collection (they played the Mark Taper’s Literary Cabaret and New York’s Public Theatre, are headed for London this summer and likely to come to the Taper’s main stage in September), is more plugged in to the earlier Harlem Renaissance tradition of self-mockery. Like Luis Valdez, whose early work relied entirely on a deliberate burlesque of Chicano life in white society, Wolfe infuses the self-satire with a ‘90s brazenness that still triggers discomfort in some audiences. For him it is not so much a matter of settling old cultural scores, but rather of affirming and renewing his own African-Americanness by spoofing the very things in black behavior that seem dictated by the white man’s norms.

Wolfe himself does not disagree. “There seems to be an emerging crop of people of color who feel that part of the art is not to legitimize it to white people. I don’t have to explain it. I’m playing around with form and try to use music that takes the power of blues and jazz on a journey that is more than just entertaining.

“You just have to leap on board. Just as I have to leap on board at a Neil Simon play. People will get it. If you don’t get it then it means it wasn’t done well, because (American) black culture and white culture are inextricably bound. Whatever your background, you know what’s going on. It may look like all primary colors, but what’s going on underneath is full of texture and hopefully full of revelations.”

Wolfe made a trip to Senegal recently in which he saw a dock with a door that had been used for herding future slaves on to ships. It made a deep impression. “On one side of the door you’re this one thing,” he said, “and on the other you’re this mutant--an African American.”

As a collector of folk art, “I try to explore a kind of contemporary folk theater,” he said. “What I love about folk art is that a human being made it, not a machine. When (some African tribes) plant their fields they make one field slightly imperfect. It’s their acknowledgement that people aren’t perfect. For me it’s using blues and jazz to make theater as involving, elegant, primal and sophisticated as a Bessie Smith lyric.”

In this Wolfe is not as unlike August Wilson--a spellbinding story-teller in the best old-fashioned sense--as one might think. Wilson’s affirmation of his own ethnicity is that of a poet, but he too finds solace and inspiration in the blues. His cycle of plays based in different decades of the 20th Century is a chronicle of injury and survival, seemingly naturalistic but drawing on both musical and metaphysical dimensions. In such plays as “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” “The Piano Lesson” and, in more concealed fashion, even “Two Trains Running,” totems accentuate the roots and mystery of the African-American heritage. Wolfe can identify with that.

“For the longest time,” he says, “I felt there’s August (Wilson), who’s legitimate, and then there’s me. He’s reclaiming lost stories and serving them up in a way that makes them accessible. But ‘Colored Museum’ was definitely part of some turning point, along with (the work of) Spike (Lee) and Robert Townsend. We can take that which is most sacred about us and make it laughable. It was seen as attacking the culture and not celebrating it. But I’m so arrogant about my culture that I can examine it and take it apart.”

So Wolfe is only the latest in a long line of black writers (including Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange) to search for identity by knocking down the phony icons either inherited from whites or determined by them. But not all have put self-derogation in the service of bald satire. “Creole, shmeole,” says one of the characters in “Jam.” “There’s kikes, niggers and wops. Did I leave anybody out?”

This kind of verbal salvo is as cleansing as a fresh wind from the sea. It is not the onslaught of a Baraka or a Bullins, which is more like a hurricane. But each has its place. And Wolfe’s gentleness must not be confused with timidity. It is part of what connects him to the Harlem Renaissance.

“I love their arrogance combined with a folk sensibility,” he said of Hurston and Hughes. “They knew how to walk into a room like they belonged there. And seeing the Senegalese who are this most polished, elegant people in their traditional African clothes, but wearing sunglasses, took me right to them: it’s funk and intellect coming together. Complicated yet simple.”

You might call “Jelly’s Last Jam” complicated yet simple. For all of the musical’s resilient mixture of earthiness, eroticism and tangy black idiom, it also has some great love songs (“Play the Music for Me” and the show’s dazzler: “Lovin’ Is a Lowdown Blues”). The gentleness both tempers and enhances the irony.

At the Taper, “Jelly’s Last Jam” was a healthy, disorderly jumble, but more from an embarrassment of riches than a paucity of ideas. Wolfe’s is a complicated talent in a helluva hurry, so that things pour out of him in a profusion that takes some sorting out. In time, less will be more. But song for song, number for number, this “Jam” is rich, ironic, rude, self-critical and exciting.

When Wolfe came back to town the final weekend of the show, he declared himself “quite delighted” with the way the production had coalesced. “I realized how much it became its own sort of formula,” he said. “It’s musical theater with some other kind of spin that I still don’t know what it is. Whatever changes I make will have to be in that style.”

When Wolfe had come back to see “Jam” the first time, he added, “I saw everything that was wrong. This time I saw everything that was exciting and wonderful.” So how much work will be done on the show remains to be determined. Meanwhile, he’s not worried. “The main thing I’m trying to do right now,” he said, as he gears up to take “Spunk” to London, “is forget it.”