Although it ran off-Broadway for 42 years — a total of 17,162 performances, more than any show in modern history — The Fantasticks is a very fragile piece of theater.

A tale of young love and the loss of innocence, this enduring musical is rooted in its simplicity. Fortunately, Palm Beach Dramaworks’ J. Barry Lewis understands that directors embroider the show with added staging business at their peril.

Instead he relies on the audience’s imagination and a few deft low-tech effects — handfuls of colored paper squares tossed into the air, a paper lantern that magically floats to the sky and glitter dust rain sprinkled by hand — to help cast the show’s charming spell.

Having long since become a staple of community theater and school productions, chances are you have already seen The Fantasticks. But by giving it the care the company regularly extends to weightier fare, Dramaworks makes the case for seeing the show once more.

Based on Edmond Rostand’s Les Romanesques, this allegorical fable concerns a callow couple, Matt and Luisa, whose fathers manipulate them into courtship by faking a feud and forbidding them to see one another. When they disobey as expected, their dads then hire a roving bandit, El Gallo, to abduct Luisa so that Matt can perform a dashing rescue.

As with the more complex Into the Woods, the first act ends happily, only to be followed by a darker, more cynical second half. Matt goes off to experience the cruel world while Luisa stays home and falls into El Gallo’s clutches.

Much of Matt and Luisa’s expressions of love border on purple poetry, as does El Gallo’s narration. Jacob Heimer and Jennifer Molly Bell deliver the former with exaggerated earnest, while Jim Ballard hits the right note of sinister chill with the latter.

Somehow, what sounds arch in book writer Tom Jones’s dialogue seems natural and affecting in his lyrics, paired so succinctly with Harvey Schmidt’s music on such numbers as the opening ballad Try to Remember, the love duet Soon It’s Gonna Rain and the jazzy male duet, I Can See It. The entire score is rendered simply, yet effectively by Craig D. Ames on piano and Kay Kemper on harp.

Lewis does not skimp on the show’s dark tones, but he also embraces its abundant comic relief. Barry Tarallo and Cliff Goulet all but steal the show as the two sage, but clownish fathers, capably handling the evening’s two vaudeville song-and-dance turns, Never Say No and Plant a Radish.

Out-buffooning them in support are Dennis Creaghan as a dithery old Shakespearean and Tangi Colombel as his sidekick Mortimer, who specializes in extravagant stage deaths. The most original performance, though, comes from Cliff Burgess as the stage-managing Mute, conveying plenty of attitude in his silence.

Despite his frequent scowl and the show’s cynical edge, Dramaworks’ take on The Fantasticks still manages to disarm us. Maybe that is the magic trick, the creation of enchantment without seeming to chase after it.