Adaptation lively despite its dated subject

What matters most: Efficiency or humanity?

The question forms the heart of “Adding Machine: A Musical,” a one-act show focusing on a worker whose career ends with the emergence of the adding machine.

Otterbein University’s staging of the show — a joint production of the school’s Theatre & Dance Department and its Music Department — continues through Saturday.

Derived from a 1923 play by Elmer Rice, the 2007 musical retains the setting of its source material — a wise choice because issues of labor and mechanization permeated pop culture in the 1920s. Consider, for example, King Vidor’s film “The Crowd” (1928), about a man who seeks to detach himself from the horde, or Fritz Lang’s film “Metropolis” (1927).

“Adding Machine: A Musical” is not in their class, but Otterbein’s production — skillfully directed by Lenny Leibowitz — is stylish and stimulating.

As the worker Mr. Zero, J.T. Wood initially projects a Kafka-esque passivity. The show begins with Mr. Zero and his wife (Lottie Mae Prenevost) beside each other in bed; he listens while she harps and harangues.

A spirited comic performer, Prenevost seems to take particular pleasure in dropping her “g’s” in the witty libretto by Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt: “I was a fool for marryin’ you,” she sings. Expertly performed by three musicians, Schmidt’s score is creepy and catchy in a Sondheim sort of way.

Wood soon brings his character’s under-thesurface rage to the fore: Not taking his job loss lightly, Mr. Zero kills his boss. Wood sings with fervor songs in which Mr. Zero justifies his actions or invites empathy, including a paean to his pitiful final meal — ham and eggs — before meeting the electric chair.

Other standouts in the cast include sweet-voiced Payton Tevis as Mr. Zero’s convivial co-worker, Daisy Devore, and self-assured Trey Plutnicki as Mr. Zero’s slick, soon-to-be-slain boss.

With winding pipes and dangling light bulbs, Dan Gray’s changing set evokes not only a subterranean workplace (think of the film “Joe Versus the Volcano”) and a prison cell — but also a bucolic hereafter.

The musical’s limitation is one of imagination: The show sees laborers such as Mr. Zero as victims of capitalism but doesn’t recognize that it takes human ingenuity, after all, to create wonders such as the adding machine.

As such, the show is a bit of a throwback — but one performed with a fresh burst of energy by the Otterbein students.