The recent Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, which won Tony nominations for Best Revival, for its director and sound designer and several cast members, has come to San Francisco for just a few select performances. And it's playing at the Curran through Sunday.

While not all of the cast who closed out a several-times-extended Broadway run in January have gone on tour, a number of them have — including the great Gavin Creel as Cinderella's Prince and the Wolf, doing some genius comedic work. And Tony winner Stephanie J. Block, who with husband Sebastian Arcelus replaced Sara Bareilles and Brian D'Arcy James on Broadway in October, continues the lead role of the Baker's Wife, with Arcelus as the Baker.

Some of the newer replacements in the cast come with big credentials and talent of their own, like Tony nominee and two-time Drama Desk Award winner Montego Glover as The Witch. (Glover did not go on Tuesday or Wednesday at the Curran, possibly due to illness, but The Witch was played by the very talented understudy Felicia Curry.)

The show was brought to Broadway last summer after it was created as an Encores! concert production at City Center last spring directed by Lear deBessonet — with casting choices who were in some cases blessed by Stephen Sondheim himself, before his November 2021 passing at age 91. And most of the pleasures and new power of this production come from deBessonet's steady, witty hand in imagining a fairly simple staging for the show — halfway between a concert production and a full-fledged one, with the orchestra occupying a good chunk of the stage, just behind the action.

The characters and their interwoven stories may be familiar to most musical theater fans by now, but the tone and emotional resonance in this production feel new — emboldened, and at once more broadly comic and more real, at turns.

This Little Red Riding Hood — in a version that garnered a Tony nomination for Julia Lester, but played in the touring production perfectly brilliantly by Katy Geraghty — is pugnacious, fierce, and ravenous, and yet she still manages to have a moment of sheer, heartrending vulnerability before the last midnight.

This Milky White is an incredibly effective, emotive puppet cow, puppeteered masterfully by Kennedy Kanagawa, complete with his own facial expressions to match.

These princes — with Creel, again, doing top-notch work and Jason Forbach doing equally well in the role of Rapunzel's Prince — are goofy caricatures, sure. But they are also, we discover, men with conflicting desires and self-destructive tendencies.

This baker and his wife — played by a TV star with a terrific singing voice, Sebastian Arcelus (House of Cards, Madame Secretary) and real-life wife, Block, in what Block says is the fulfillment of "a years-long dream" to play these roles on stage together — are the salt-of-the-earth emotional center of the show, still. But when the two get to duet on "It Takes Two," and when Block hits the melodic zenith of "Moments in the Woods" in Act 2 — "Let the moment go/ don't forget it for a moment, though / Just remembering you've had an and when you're back to or/ makes the or mean more than it did before..." — it transcends the silliness of the fairy tales and strikes at the beating heart of Sondheim and James Lapine's profound intentions with this show.

As Cinderella, understudy Ellie Fishman also turns in a stellar performance, both physically comedic in several pratfalls down the palace steps, and deeply resonant with her verse of the Act 2 pre-closer, "No One Is Alone."

In the original New York Times review of the Encores! production, which helped propel it to Broadway and now on tour, critic Alexis Soloski noted how this production feels imbued with the pain, isolation, and cathartic coming together we've all experienced the last several years. And it seems inherently to reflect Lear deBessonet's own "long history of community engagement and activism. And that song, "No One Is Alone," takes on new meaning as time goes on, maybe moreso than any of the other lovely and memorable tunes in the show.

Just to be reminded, as mothers sometimes have to do for their children, that "someone is on your side," and "you decide what's right, you decide what's good" — these lines will never stop being powerful. And if last night's audience is any indicator, they're part of a deeply resonant piece of theater that can still bring people to their feet in thunderous applause.

'Into the Woods' plays tonight through Sunday, June 25, with matinees both Saturday and Sunday. Find tickets here.