No Barney songs here. 24th Street aims for more sophistication in family performances.

Fairy tale capers and clownish pablum don’t cut it at the 24th Street Theatre. “We decided that wacky hat stuff is not where it’s at,” said Debbie Devine, co-founder and family programming director.

At this nonprofit USC-neighborhood venue, the mission is to give young audiences the real thing--professional, adult-quality family theater. In pursuit of that mission, Devine and husband Jay Mc- Adams, co-founder and executive director, are making forays into unexpected, some might say risky, territory.

Take a look at what’s in store in the return of the theater’s 5-year-old annual Saturday Explorer Series, opening this weekend.

Performance artists, those scourges of the public arts-funding debate, have a hefty presence in this free, six-week slate of family shows. So do a Bulgarian pop star, a piano-bar sophisticate and the Campers, a Pennsylvania-based physical theater duo in a “Camping Trip From Hell.”

Consider series-opener Krassimir, the single-monikered Bulgarian male soprano.

“We’ve seen him at the Acropolis singing, with 10,000 teenage girls screaming, clawing at his clothing--he’s the Ricky Martin of Bulgaria,” McAdams said. But before Krassimir found his voice as a pop star, he was a renowned mime artist and mime teacher in Eastern Europe. (Now an L.A. resident, he began teaching pantomime in January at the Colburn School, where Devine heads the drama department.)

So he will show off his four-octave vocal range, but mainly, with classic Marcel Marceau acts, his own physical material and live musical accompaniment, Krassimir will enact the tale of an old mime who lives through his memories; he is sure that children will identify with the emotional layers.

“Most people are afraid of [performing for children],” he said. “They don’t know how they will react. But children are the real audience. You can see what they think. They express themselves so easily: They cry, they laugh. They want to find the kind of light that makes them happy, that warms them.”

Professional lounge singer Cindy White is no kiddie act, either. Her repertoire ranges from Cole Porter to the Beatles.

“We don’t know what her sets are going to be,” McAdams said. “We don’t want her to do Barney songs. What we thought was interesting about her [dinner club act] is that she really worked the room. We want kids to see that.” To that end, White will perform in a club setting, with mood lighting, piano and tip jar. Apple juice will be served.

The crossover artists, hailing from such frankly adult venues as Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, are Dan Kwong and Sara Felder--she a gentle but pointed social satirist and juggler extraordinaire, he an intrepid multimedia explorer of male Asian American identity.

And while kids may recognize Beakman, the Emmy-winning star of “Beakman’s World,” in his “Personal Beakman” show, this wacky science guy is also a Highways veteran: the edgy-funny, off-the-wall puppeteer Paul Zaloom.

‘A Human View, Not

Just an Adult View’

Devine is confident that young audiences will respond to performance art’s highly visual one-on-one quality. The challenge, she said, is to convince the artists--who may be more accustomed to incurring the ire of Congress than to doing family shows--”that what they have to say is a human view, not just an adult view.”

She’s being aided by family theater convert and Highways regular Jude Narita, critically acclaimed for her one-woman shows about Asian and Asian American women. Narita performed in the first Saturday Explorer series in 1998, though only after “a lot of cajoling.”

“They had to drag me into it. I was terrified,” Narita said. “‘My work is very much text-oriented, dark, very political,’ I said. ‘You don’t understand. I talk, that’s all I do is talk. It would be boring.’”

But “it was wonderful.” Young people of all ages responded not only to comic elements but to the “rough emotional journeys” of a girl in Hiroshima and women of Cambodia.

“It was a lesson to me,” she said. “Your expectations of children can be limited or condescending without meaning to be [but] the kids are right there. I found out that I can create something that is true to me, and I don’t feel that I’m cheating my characters.”

The series will be terra incognita for Sara Felder, whose Jewish, lesbian identity fuels her work, but her family-friendliness won’t surprise those who have seen her signature mix of astonishing juggling, humor and humanity.

Times theater reviewer F. Kathleen Foley called Felder’s one-woman show, “June Bride,” “a veritable tribute to family values.”

Still, if she hadn’t heard of Narita’s enthusiastic conversion, Felder wouldn’t be taking the plunge.

“It’s challenging to think about what’s appropriate, not just in the gay material, but in the Jewish material also,” Felder said.

“Basically, I’m going to treat it like a vaudeville. I have some just really fun routines, it’s very visual and there’s a lot of stuff that is pure shtick,” with hula-hooping, manipulations of a crystal ball, “devil sticks” and boxes.

Kwong was less hesitant, cautioning only that the recommended age level be 12 and older for his solo play, “The Night the Moon Came Out on 39th Street,” which he calls “the most broadly accessible piece I’ve ever done.”

The humorous and soulful work is loaded with live and video projections, music and voice-overs, props and costumes. Based on Kwong’s experiences as a child and young adult, it is interwoven with anecdotes about the U.S. space program and was created, Kwong said, to “shine a light on that wonder that children possess about the world around them.”

Even the series finale, with the veteran youth theater, Mark Taper Forum’s P.L.A.Y., defies expectations.

A comic satire of gender stereotyping, it is Scottish theater company Visible Fictions’ adaptation of Anne Fine’s novel, “Bill’s New Frock,” about a boy who decides one day to wear a dress.

“We’re cultivating artists, in a way,” Devine said. “Helping them discover a different audience and a different approach to their art. [And] there is so much exciting, cutting-edge and avant-garde theater for youth. We want to be immersed in it, to be a part of it. We want to bring it here.”

“Saturday Explorer Series,” 24th Street Theatre, 1117 W. 24th St., L.A. Saturdays, 1 p.m. This Saturday: Krassimir’s “Memories,” ages 5 and up. Feb. 23: Cindy White in “Cindy Sings the Blues,” ages 5 and up. March 2: The Campers’ “Camping Trip From Hell,” ages 5 and up. March 9: Dan Kwong’s “The Night the Moon Landed on 39th Street,” ages 12 and up. March 16: “Beakman in Person,” ages 6 and up. March 23: Sara Felder’s “Juggling and Some Antics,” ages 8 and up. Mark Taper Forum’s P.L.A.Y. in “Bill’s New Frock,” ages 6 and up. Free; reservations required. (213) 745-6516.