Grown-ups of New York, are you ready to be told the best bedtime story you’ve heard since you were a credulous tyke? It’s called “Beauty and the Beast.” And yeah, I know what you’re thinking: You’ve heard that one before; your daughter made you watch the Disney movie with her like 28 times; and if you wanted something more sophisticated, you’d just slip on your digitally enhanced edition of Jean Cocteau’s “La Belle et La Bête” from 1946.

But, honest, you’ve never met a Beauty and Beast like the couple delivering their idea of story hour — not to mention an impressive variety of sexual positions — at the Abrons Arts Center through March 30. Our immortal title characters are being portrayed by the performance artists Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser, a husband and wife who met while working in a sideshow on Coney Island.

On the surface, I have little in common with Mr. Fraser and Ms. Muz. I have no experience in burlesque (like the Detroit-born Ms. Muz) or a visible physical deformity (like the British-born Mr. Fraser, who was born with what he calls “small and perfectly deformed arms”), and I have spent no time at all since my infancy on public display in the altogether. Yet I found myself personally involved with and moved by this “Beauty and the Beast” in ways I never had been before. Odds are you’ll feel the same way.

Sweet are the uses of enchantment. Under the direction of the extravagantly imaginative Phelim McDermott, who staged Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha” at the Metropolitan Opera, Mr. Fraser and Ms. Muz unfold a bona fide fairy tale for adults that — unlike most latter-day examples of that genre — is neither dark and cynical nor precious and coy.