Here's a Broadway musical about a young man who sets out to discover true meaning in his life, dabbling in war, sex, and politics before finding love. That may sound conventional, but it isn't. The title character of Pippin is the son of Charlemagne, the 9th-century emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and when Bob Fosse directed the original Broadway production in 1972, he transformed what had begun as a fairly innocent college project for composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz into a burlesque filled with broad comedy, bawdy characters, and magical but dark situations. Pippin (played by William Katt, of TV's The Greatest American Hero) embarks on his quest, all the way coaxed and goaded by a narrator figure known as the Leading Player (Ben Vereen) while his stepmother (Chita Rivera) schemes.