That makes sense: Musicals are the works that, in our time, most often approach the scale and complexity of the canonical histories and comedies. Songs are often like soliloquies and call on some of the same performance techniques. And Stratford, with its superb costume and wig departments, is especially well suited to the kinds of transformation this repertoire requires.

Which is why I didn’t recognize Mr. Chameroy. In miner’s drag and a thatchy hairpiece, he looked 25 years older as Jackie Elliot than he had as Frank N. Furter; the bravado and joy of that “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania” were replaced by Jackie’s sense of loss (his wife has died) and anger (his industry is dying). When his 11-year-old son, Billy (Nolen Dubuc), reveals a talent for ballet, a third element complicates the others: bewilderment.

I was moved by “Billy Elliot” on Broadway; there are certainly some things that the director Stephen Daldry was able to do in that production that Donna Feore, the director and choreographer of this one, cannot. On the festival’s deep-thrust stage, the aerial scene in which Billy is partnered by a future vision of himself comes off a bit flat. The social class satire of Billy’s audition for the Royal Ballet is way overplayed, as if trying to bank cheap laughs in a family show. Perhaps for the same reason, the treatment of Billy’s nascent sexuality, and especially that of his cross-dressing best friend, seems hasty and avoidant.

But in most other ways, Ms. Feore’s thrilling version finds new doors into the material and strides confidently through them. The political story is especially rich here, perhaps because the catastrophic job loss facing Easington in “Billy Elliot” as Margaret Thatcher privatizes the coal mines closely resembles what the city of Stratford faced in the early 1950s when the collapse of steam power destroyed its railroad industry . The festival was devised to promote economic recovery; out of hard times came theater.