‘Amélie’ is a dream of a musical at Berkeley Rep

A dreamy movie becomes a dream of a stage musical in “Amélie, A New Musical,” the blithe experiment in theatrical magic that opened Friday at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

Playwright Craig Lucas (“Prelude to a Kiss,” “The Light in the Piazza”), composer-lyricist Daniel Messé (principal songwriter for the band Hem) and lyricist Nathan Tysen have excavated the central story and fleshed it out, to focus more strongly on the coming-of-age-through-love tale of a radiant, smart but — emotionally — almost cripplingly shy young woman.

The result is a story that grows increasingly captivating, starting from nine-year-old Savvy Crawford’s winningly precocious, imaginative and bright-voiced Young Amélie’s determinedly fantasized happy childhood.

Her Amélie enchants with an unassuming charisma and a generosity that brings out the sad, unfulfilled core within her youthful, joy in life, boundless curiosity and broad empathy.

[...] she sings Messé’s bright, folk-inflected melodies with a sweet, full, at times country-western heart.

In place of the original’s dreamlike and hallucinatory elements, MacKinnon and her designers deploy old- and new-fashioned stagecraft to fantastical ends, from David Zinn’s brightly caricatured costumes to the towering walls of chests, bureaus and amoires of his set, transformed into a cafe or the garrets of Montmarte by deft lighting effects and Peter Nigrini’s cleverly unobtrusive projections.

Choreographer Sam Pinkleton makes the whole production seem light on its toes, transforming everyday actions and gestures into buoyant movement patterns, never more delightfully than in the repetitive, cyclical-rut ensemble of cafe habitues singing “What Am I Waiting For?” ( “I’m waiting for something worth waiting for”).

Messé and Tysen’s captivating, eclectic and almost always humor-tinged songs keep the show moving at a swift clip, propelled by musical director Kimberly Grigsby’s terrific eight-piece, onstage band.

Trapeze survivor Maria-Christina Oliveras, love-lorn Paul Whitty, saucy Carla Duren and sickly Alyse Alan Louis are outstanding as other cafe denizens, as is Tony Sheldon as the old would-be painter (he paints another copy of the same Renoir every year) who serves as Amélie’s unlikely guardian angel.

With such talents as Lucas, Messé, MacKinnon and a number of Broadway veterans on board, Broadway aspirations seem almost certainly involved, though no one is saying so yet, for the record at least — despite a title that makes it sound like the creators don’t expect the show to have a long shelf life.