“Hippest Trip: The Soul Train Musical” had its long-awaited opening night at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, after five years of development and many a pandemic-induced delay. The movie star Blair Underwood was walking the red carpet. Roots frontman and music legend Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, one of the show’s executive producers, was down in the orchestra seats. San Francisco mayor London Breed strutted onstage in a fire engine red pantsuit worthy of a trip down the Soul Train line to work up our enthusiasm. Then the lights exploded, and “Soul Train” host and creator Don Cornelius (played by Quentin Earl Darrington) rose through a hidden trap door wearing his fly powder-blue suit. Soon after the train left the station, one thing was clear: If this show makes it to the Great White Way in spring 2024, as it has set out to do, the triumph will be thanks to choreographer Camille A. Brown.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be notable in a musical about “Soul Train,” which over its 36 years on television was always driven by dancing, from its zenith of Black joy in the 1970s through its slow slide to irrelevance as first disco and then hip hop rose in the 1980s and 90s. But “Hippest Trip” has an odd internal conflict. Among its plot points is that Don Cornelius’s enterprise runs on sheer dance talent, yet Cornelius refuses to pay those dance talents with anything more than mere “exposure” while continuing to pressure standout performers, like Rosie Perez, into signing their business interests over to him. In the world of the musical, the dancers should win. But Cornelius is this show’s hero, and the storyline works with what his biography dictates. Cornelius never gave the dancers their share, despite the intercessionary pleas of legendary talent manager Pam Brown. He never repented, but instead withdrew to recover from a brain aneurysm alone, refused to hand the show over to his son (who could have helped it keep up with the times), and then committed suicide, in 2012, at the age of 75.