TIME TO BE `SPELL'-BOUND : THE FACTS.

It's a show about being homeless in New York City.

No wait - it's a show about being dispossessed in South Africa.

Then again, maybe it's a distinctly L.A. show, a plea for community and spiritual renewal in the long, dark afterglow of the '92 riots.

Actually, says composer Stephen Schwartz, ``Godspell'' is all those shows, and several more besides.

`` `Godspell' is a show that sort of gets revised each time it gets done, because there's a lot of room to update in the specific improvisational bits,'' says the 48-year-old author of the scores for two musical-theater perennials, ``Godspell'' and ``Pippin,'' and the soundtrack for last summer's animated Disney feature, ``The Hunchback of Notre Dame.''

``Each production (of `Godspell') has a social context,'' Schwartz elaborates. ``When you go to see a show like `My Fair Lady' or `Guys and Dolls,' or indeed most of my shows, the show is its own context, and you don't bring Edwardian England or (Damon) Runyon's New York out with you, other than as a pleasant memory.''

Though high school and college drama coaches have sworn by it for 25 years, ``Godspell'' this time is getting a full-scale professional production that will split the next four weeks between Glendale's Alex Theater and the Probst Center of the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza. James Barbour, fresh from starring in the Los Angeles production of ``Beauty and the Beast,'' headlines the cast of 10.

Credit the musical's staying power to its hardy source material.

Breezily adapted from St. Matthew's Gospel, it was conceived by Schwartz and librettist John-Michael Tebelak as a New Testament for the Now Generation. Its disarming premise was to turn Jesus Christ into a candy-colored harlequin-Superman and his disciples into a vaudevillian band of urban waifs.

Props and costumes were minimal. The set could have fit in the back of a Volkswagen.

Bouncily choreographed and poignantly childlike, ``Godspell'' was the Sermon on the Mount as Sesame Street, the celestial kingdom as Woodstock minus the mud and dysentery.

``It was born out of the protest movements of the Vietnam War, born out of the Generation Gap, born out of what John-Michael saw as the stodginess of Broadway theater at that time,'' Schwartz says.

It worked like a minor miracle. ``Godspell'' ran six years, on and off Broadway, and gave birth to a top-20 pop hit, ``Day by Day,'' and a 1973 movie starring Victor Garber.

Schwartz has had plenty of other practice balancing the sacred with the profane. His ``Hunchback'' lyrics probed issues of carnal sin and redemption. He recently finished the score for ``Children of Eden,'' a re-examination of the first nine chapters of the Book of Genesis, and he's at work on DreamWorks SKG's animated feature ``Prince of Egypt,'' about the life of Moses.

All of which makes it tempting to assume that Schwartz must be some kind of zealot, eager to convert the masses.

Guess again.

``I am not a member of any organized religion, and I don't think of myself as a particularly religious person, not at all,'' he replies.

``They're big subjects, I guess. They have to do with'' - here Schwartz affects a stentorian voice - ``man's relationship to the universe, and the purpose of life. I guess that's what appeals to me.''

What: ``Godspell.''

Where: Alex Theater, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale; Probst Center at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, 2100 E. Thousand Oaks Blvd.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday.

Tickets: $32.50 to $37.50.

Information: For Glendale, [phone]. For Thousand Oaks, [phone] or [phone].

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos, Box

Photo: (1) SCHWARTZ

(2) A favorite of high school and college drama coaches for 25 years, ``Godspell'' this time is getting a full-scale professional production.

Box: The weekend's top 10