Perhaps Charles Dickens strikes you as too much of a timid miniaturist. Or maybe “The Coast of Utopia” was a bit too small-minded, too unambitious for your taste.

If so, get ready to feast your eyes, ears, and tear ducts on “Coram Boy.”

Director Melly Still’s triumphant production, a hit at London’s National Theatre during the last two Christmases, is stuffed to the gills: with music, with plot, with actors (dozens of them), and with alchemic stagecraft, with nightmarish evil and transcendent beauty. Helen Edmundson has fashioned Jamila Gavin’s epic young-adult novel into a boisterous and unfashionably earnest tear-jerker. They certainly don’t make them like this anymore. I’m not sure they ever did.

Recounting the plot could easily take up this entire review, even with Ms. Edmundson’s exemplary streamlining. But for starters: At the center of “Coram Boy,” set in 18th-century England, are two young men with daddy issues. There’s Alexander Ashbrook (Xanthe Elbrick), a musical prodigy whose father wants him out of choral school and back learning how to run the lavish family estate, and Meshak Gardiner (Brad Fleischer), a half-feral simpleton who travels with his peddler father, Otis (Bill Camp). Otis has carved out a lucrative sideline ferrying unwanted babies to the brand-new Coram Foundling Hospital. Or so he says. He and the guilt-stricken Meshak actually bury the newborns in the forest, usually (but not always) after they’ve already died of starvation and neglect.

These two families come into fateful contact when Alexander impregnates the comely Melissa Milcote (Ivy Vahanian) — who also happens to be the spitting image of a stone angel that Meshak worships. That phrase “who also happens to be” would get a bit of a workout in any longer synopsis; the story hinges on one major coincidence after another. Before “Coram Boy” jounces its way to an improbably stirring (and stirringly improbable) finale, the creators have found room for shady servants, midnight confessions, a dockyard fight to the death, and even a white-slavery ring.

And music. Lots of music. Handel’s “Messiah” is a major plot point, with the composer himself making a cameo (played by Quentin Maré). Adrian Sutton has also written more than an hour’s worth of original music to accompany the Handel sequences. While Ms. Gavin’s book depicted these chorales as an escape from the era’s deprivations and cruelties, Ms. Still opts for a more cinematic approach, underscoring entire scenes with a 20-member chorus and seven-piece orchestra in addition to the onstage Coram choir. (By casting women as the young boys, she and music director Constantine Kitsopolous replicate the pure, vibrato-free boy choir sound marvelously.) The use of religious music in a secular context can be confusing: Does Ms. Still really intend to conflate Alexander and Melissa’s baby with the Christ child by using Handel’s “For Unto Us a Child Is Born”? But Mr. Sutton has also composed an array of dissonant, macabre sounds that, along with the superb lighting design by Paule Constable and Ed McCarthy, contribute mightily to the piece’s gothic delights.

Virtually devoid of even a glimmer of humor (shy of a few mugging adults set loose as little kids), let alone any distancing irony, “Coram Boy” seeks its satisfactions in the unapologetically feverish realm of melodrama. The characters show little of the quirks or shadings that might transform them from storybook figures into human beings. They are cogs in a wheel, albeit a wonderfully ornate wheel.

One prominent exception is the splendid Jan Maxwell, who gives the sinister housekeeper Mrs. Lynch an intriguing frisson of ambivalence. Ms. Elbrick is affecting as two separate generations of Ashbrook boys, Charlotte Parry enlivens Act 1 as Alexander’s lower-class schoolmate, and the richvoiced Mr. Camp makes an appropriately hiss-worthy villain. Everyone else in the massive cast pushes the story along robustly and convincingly.

The book’s cavernous sprawl has necessitated some cuts for the stage. And while Ms. Edmundson has done a superb job of shifting pivotal actions into the hands of her (relatively) compressed cast, I would have liked to seen more of Toby (Uzo Aduba), a black Coram boy whom Ms. Gavin used to sketch out the effects of the thenflourishing slave trade.

At the same time, Ms. Edmundson and Ms. Still show an admirable willingness to slow the dizzying narrative when the story demands it. An earlier vignette in which an inconsolable mother (Angela Lin) abandons her newborn girl to Otis, followed by the protracted depiction of the baby’s ghastly fate, is as uncompromising an image of evil as you’ll find onstage.

But at the risk of sounding like a skittish ad campaign, hellbent on finding a bright gloss on frequently somber subject matter, “Coram Boy” is suffused with a love of storytelling and a deep commitment to grabbing a willing audience by its throat. Like the composer at its periphery, Ms. Still and her enormously talented cast and crew have created a joyful, thunderous pageant that warrants a hallelujah.

Open run (249 W. 45th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).