The director and musical director, along with choreographer Kimberly Braton, take full advantage of the song-and-dance aspect, using it to intensify and oversize the fable much as I think Brecht intended. There are no instruments, just voices, but no help is needed. For that matter, there is no set - just a big space and a few props. This staging allows the actors to create the world of the play through pure human presence.

The most important presence is that of Grusha, played with sensitivity and bravado by the unsinkable Rachel Tiemann. Inspired, by the basic feelings of compassion and loyalty, to feats of endurance, bravery, and sacrifice, the servant-turned-heroine bears most of the story's moral weight, and Tiemann is easily up to the task, moving with ease from glacial defensiveness (with the humor that implies) through fear and humility. John Castro is a delightful, snoring Fat Prince, and John Kevin Jones mesmerizes as the grandiloquent, increasingly drunken judge Azdak. Ayana Siverls strides proudly and funnily through her travails as the Governor's vain widow, while Matthew Kinney is hilarious as (among other roles) Grusha's cowardly brother.

Richard Ugino is the best kind of ham, Elizabeth Mirarchi has a beautiful voice... I could go on, but this would get boring. They're all good. An episodic play like this can be a challenge for actors, with new, important characters appearing late in the action, or for discrete scenes, some never to be seen again, yet all needing to be made real. Brecht's brilliant writing — here in the original translation, to which W. H. Auden contributed — makes the structure workable; the present company's great cleverness and enormous talent make it pulsate with the outsize, exaggerated energy of real life.

Given all that, one might, on first consideration, wonder if the production mutes Brecht's political message in favor of physical comedy and sentiment. I think, though, it's in the power of the story itself, and especially in this brash telling, that the message comes out most forcefully: compassion has the potential to confront, mitigate, even surmount the greed and graft that underline human institutions. "Didn't send enough troops. Embezzled funds. Brought sick horses." Such lines don't need to be overstressed for us to get the ongoing relevance of Brecht's point about corruption and war profiteering; it's in the story as a whole, together with its opposite - the power of compassion. This staging is a brilliant expression of Brecht's wide-angle vision.

Through May 11 at the Theatres at 45 Bleecker Street. Visit the Hipgnosis website for ticket information, or call Telecharge at (212) 239-6200 or (800) 432-7250.

Photo (L-R): Pharah Jean-Philippe (The Elder Lady) and Elizabeth Mirarchi (The Younger Lady). Photo by John Castro.