No Copter. No Chandelier. No Pig. : Can the tune-filled but admittedly low-tech ‘State Fair’ compete with the mega-musicals of the ‘90s?

As teen-agers in 1970, Tom Briggs and Louis Mattioli met in a state-sponsored group of touring singers and dancers called “The Kids From Wisconsin.” The group performed at county fairs and the Wisconsin State Fair.

About 20 years later, the two wrote the book for a stage musical about teen-agers at a state fair. Based on the Rodgers & Hammerstein-scored 1945 movie musical, which was in turn based on Phil Stong’s 1932 novel, “State Fair” returns to Southern California on Wednesday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.

Long Beach Civic Light Opera presented an earlier version of “State Fair” in 1992. A couple of months afterward, co-writer Mattioli--who was 38 and had been “perfectly healthy,” said partner Briggs--died after a sudden bout with a bacterial infection. After recovering from the shock, Briggs returned to “State Fair.”

Now the show is a bigger deal than ever. The producer of the current tour is the New York-based Theatre Guild, which also produced the first Rodgers & Hammerstein landmark, “Oklahoma!,” in 1943. “State Fair” is being touted as the last Rodgers & Hammerstein musical; all of their other scores have been staged. The Guild plans to take “State Fair” to Broadway next year.

Briggs said he and his partner never set out to write a Broadway musical. “We wanted to write something for the stock and amateur market”--which has been depleted recently by the tendency of the mega-musical producers to hold on to their rights for years, as well as by the sophisticated nature of some of the recent shows.

“Whether you can bring an old-fashioned show with painted sets to Broadway, I don’t know,” Briggs said. “If you want a $9-million techno-musical, this isn’t it. But with a title like ‘State Fair,’ [Broadway audiences] may expect to see a roller-coaster onstage.”

In the meantime, though, the show has drawn crowds and generally favorable reviews during a succession of stops closer to the heartland than to Broadway.

Cerritos, this week’s tour stop, is only 10 miles from Long Beach, where “State Fair” played in 1992. But the show “has come a long way since Long Beach,” Briggs said. “It’s much tighter, more focused. Changing the end of the first act really helped.”

The first act now ends with one of the original movie score’s two most famous songs, “A Grand Night for Singing.” (The other one is the Academy Award-winning “It Might as Well Be Spring.”)

“A Grand Night” involves all three of the couples in the story and “takes them a step forward,” Briggs said. That was how the first act ended in the show’s only pre-Long Beach engagement, in Winston-Salem, N.C., but in Long Beach the show’s collaborators experimented with a different first-act finale that focused on only one of the couples. That number, “This Isn’t Heaven” (which originated in the 1962 film remake--”a horrible picture,” Briggs said), has now been eliminated from the show.

Furthermore, the Cerritos score includes one number that wasn’t heard in Long Beach: “So Far,” from the Rodgers & Hammerstein score for “Allegro.”

As might be surmised from this, the score is a patchwork, for the original movie score wasn’t long enough to sustain a Broadway-type show. The collaborators scanned the R&H; repertoire for songs that would fit this story--yet weren’t too familiar from other shows. Included are six songs from the original plus one from the 1962 remake, two from “Pipe Dream,” one each from “Me and Juliet” and “Allegro,” two that were cut from “Oklahoma!” and one that was cut from “Me and Juliet.”

The show still tells the tale of a farm family, the Frakes, whose trip to the fair is almost as momentous as that of Wilbur the Pig’s in “Charlotte’s Web.”

The cast is starrier than in Long Beach. John Davidson and Kathryn Crosby (Bing Crosby’s widow) play the parents who have high hopes for their prize pig and mincemeat, respectively; Andrea McArdle (the original “Annie”) plays the teen-aged daughter who falls for a big-city newspaper reporter (Scott Wise); Donna McKechnie (the first Cassie in “A Chorus Line”) plays the professional singer at the fair who begins a romance with the Frake son (Ben Wright).

James Hammerstein, son of Oscar Hammerstein II, is co-directing this version, with Randy Skinner. In Long Beach, Hammerstein had a “production supervised by” credit.

The Long Beach set is still in use. Long Beach Civic Light Opera associate producer Don Hill said that his organization has a 20% financial interest in the set but no financial interest in the show itself. However, Ron Kumin, the producer who launched “State Fair” in 1992 as part of North Carolina School of the Arts Foundation’s Broadway series, said LBCLO shares (to what degree he wouldn’t say) in the North Carolina foundation’s “total interest” in the current production.

As in Long Beach--and despite the recent success of the pig movie “Babe”--the actual pig promoted by Mr. Frake remains offstage. Briggs said that Davidson, who plays Mr. Frake, was urging the producers to cast a real pig. But in Des Moines, where the tour opened last month in conjunction with the Iowa State Fair, Davidson changed his tune, Briggs said, after he posed for publicity shots with a pig “who peed on him.”

“Just hearing about the pig is plenty,” Briggs declared.

*

“STATE FAIR,”Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos. Dates: Wednesday-next Sunday, 8 p.m.; Saturday-next Sunday, 2 p.m. Prices: $30-$50. Phone: (310) 916-8500 or (800) 300-4345).