“If you know what you want, then you go and you find it and you get it,” sings the Baker’s Wife in Act 1 ofStephen Sondheim’sfairy-tale musical “Into the Woods.”

Well, maybe. There’s an intentionally darkish moral tinge about this lyric. Are she and her husband really justified in doinganythingto break a witch’s curse and have the child they long for?

But for San Francisco theatergoers, the mandate is far less complicated. If what you want is a superb revival of this 1987 creation, bursting with vitality and theatrical splendor, then getting it is merely a matter of making your way to the Curran Theater, where a touring version of last year’s acclaimed Broadway production opened Tuesday, June 20. The show is here for an all-too-brief eight-performance showing under the auspices of BroadwaySF.

No magic beans need to change hands.

Director Lear DeBessonet’s production, originally mounted as part of New York City Center’s Encores! series before making a quick hop to Broadway two months later, embraces everything salient about “Into the Woods,” in all its sparkly, spiky contradictions.

It’s simultaneously spare and sumptuous, tart and tender. It addresses the child in all of us, both literally and figuratively (the median age of Tuesday’s audience was visibly below the norm), while delivering adult wisdom in a nuanced form.

Best of all, this production makes one of Sondheim’s most intricately mechanical inventions hum like perfectly calibrated clockwork, without ever sacrificing the air of improvisatory freedom that underpins all good storytelling.

That’s a lot to cram so deftly into less than three hours. But then, “Into the Woods,” which weds Sondheim’s music and lyrics to a book by original director James Lapine, is a densely packed cabinet of wonders. It assembles all the familiar fairy-tale characters — not just the barren bakers, but also Cinderella, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack (of beanstalk fame) and a pair of amusingly indistinguishable Princes Charming — and sets them bouncing against one another like pinballs in the one titular forest.

These apparently distinct stories blend so seamlessly, the show argues, because they map onto central shared experiences that are of interest to the young. Rapunzel, imprisoned in a tower by an ostensibly loving parent, is a stand-in for every child who ever longed to break free of familial constraints. Little Red Riding Hood’s voyage down the wolf’s gullet is a coded story of an introduction to the squicky and intoxicating world of sex.

These aspects are all there beneath the surface, but DeBessonet wisely lets us explore them only to the extent to which we care to. For at least the first act, there are enough purely musical and theatrical thrills to keep us fully engaged.

其中包括洛林Latarro多层曹reography, and a set by designerDavid Rockwellthat evokes the frights of a nocturnal forest with just a few bare birch trees and an enormous projected moon. They also include Jack’s cow Milky White, an unnervingly naturalistic full-size puppet wrangled by virtuoso puppeteer Kennedy Kanagawa.

And “Into the Woods” boasts a magnificent cast of singing actors, all of whom gave life to this mercurial score on opening night under the crisp leadership of music director John Bell.

As the bakers, the husband-and-wife team of Sebastian Arcelus and Stephanie J. Block embodied the ups and downs of married life with uncanny naturalism (and Block’s full-body vibration on getting a momentary intimation of the joys of adultery was a comedic highlight). Katy Geraghty made Little Red Riding Hood a joyous mix of ingenue and street tough, and Diane Phelan was a vivid, vocally resplendent Cinderella.

Understudy Felicia Curry stepped into the pivotal role of the Witch and delivered it with fire and pathos. Gavin Creel and Jason Forbach were the equally empty-headed princes, and Cole Thompson, his face frozen in a mask of permanent naivete and apprehension, was the simple-minded Jack.

David Patrick Kelly, as the storyteller who both presides over the evening and occasionally sets the narrative on its course, brought a venerable authority to the performance.

“Into the Woods,” famously, situates its happy ending early, with all conflicts resolved and all the marriages arranged by the time the curtain falls on Act 1.

In Act 2, everything becomes problematized. Old misdeeds require atonement, morals turn murky, and people die — a lot of them, just as in “Hamlet” or real life. This is where the piece itself turns tricky, and where DeBessonet’s artistry proves its mettle by framing the drama as a natural outgrowth of everything that’s come before.

In the nuanced and complex series of songs running through Act 2, from the Baker’s Wife’s “Any Moment” — which got a showstopping rendition by Block — to the witty patter-song bickering of “Your Fault” and to the haunting “No One Is Alone,” the remaining characters develop out of their storybook pasts into something rich and strange.

In this sure-handed account, the second act works as successfully as I’ve ever seen it, creating a new and far more satisfyingly recognizable gloss on the old rubric of “happily ever after.”

Reach Joshua Kosman:jkosman@sfchronicle.com; Twitter:@JoshuaKosman