Could This Slipper Fit Mickey?

In readying its new touring version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella,” the Networks producing organization appears to have ripped several pages from the Disney playbook.

For starters, the show incorporates animal sidekicks like those in the classic animated movie, which are depicted by puppets that look to have been inspired by the Disney stage production of “The Lion King.”

Other visuals seem to have been copied from the stage versions of both “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King.” A still more obvious reference is the 1997 “Wonderful World of Disney” TV movie, from which this production borrows its pop inflections, story structure and even one of its stars (Paolo Montalban as the Prince).

To this mixture has been added a wry, knowing attitude toward the story’s conventions, as when the herald, upon discovering Cinderella’s slipper, comments: “Who dances in glass shoes? Ouch.” The casting, too, is slyly deconstructionist, with the ageless and sexy Eartha Kitt playing the Fairy Godmother and Everett Quinton, a key player in the arty drag of Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, portraying the Stepmother.

The resulting show, adapted by Tom Briggs, operates on two levels, with sweetness, cuteness and broad humor for the kids and inside jokes for the adults. The layers coexist fairly harmoniously, though they occasionally strain at the seams. Nevertheless, the production seemed to work magic on Tuesday’s opening-night audience at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, where the production plays through Sunday.

It’s easy to see how dirt-smudged Cinderella cleans up so divinely when she’s got Kitt’s Godmother as a role model. Stunning in a sequined gown that’s slit all the way up the leg, Kitt uses that deep, champagne-soaked voice of hers to delicious effect as she psychoanalyzes the stepmother’s treatment of Cinderella by saying: “You know what her problem is? She can’t handle how fabulous you are.”

The Cinderella in question is played by Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who goes from playing a mob princess as Tony’s daughter on the HBO series “The Sopranos” to fairy-tale princess here. Sigler sings in a sweet, smooth-as-glass pop soprano and is so radiantly demure, winsome and unaffected that Montalban’s teen-heartthrob Prince couldn’t resist her if he tried.

Comically supplying the story’s nastiness factor, Quinton bites into the stepmother’s lines in a voice almost as deep as Kitt’s and looks fabulous, in his own way, with his muscular arms and shoulders exposed by his gowns.

Composer Andrew Lippa (of the Manhattan Theatre Club version of “The Wild Party,” working here with his director on that show, Gabriel Barre) adds fairly unobtrusive pop accents to his arrangements of the beloved Rodgers and Hammerstein songs. The obscure R&H; tune “There’s Music in You” that has been slip-stitched onto the end of the show, however, seems both out of place and unnecessary.

The animal puppets--four white mice, a house cat and a dove, operated by black-clad puppeteers--are a hit with kids and adults alike, and in another page from Disney, take-home reproductions of the mice are sold at the concession stand.

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* “Cinderella,” Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tonight-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Ends Sunday. $22-$57. (714) 740-7878 or (213) 365-3500.