In several interviews published before the New York premiere of his “Edward Scissorhands,” Matthew Bourne took what seemed like a few pre-emptive hits at alleged pure dance critical arbiters, who have in the past found his work deficient in choreographic invention. When “Scissorhands” opened its three-week run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it was apparent that Mr. Bourne — who, as the program states, “devised, directed and choreographed” the production — was at pains to prove his choreographic chops.

The more narrative-driven a piece, the more difficult to include extended dance invention, yet Mr Bourne includes several protracted dance numbers here. While they don’t exactly wear out their welcome, they are somewhat uncharacteristically extended, given Mr. Bourne’s customary preference for speedy pacing. The story of Edward Scissorhands isn’t terribly complicated, but it is incident-ridden nevertheless. Watching “Edward Scissorhands,” it is clear again why the sooften ridiculed plotlines of classical ballets need to be what they usually are: symbolically resonant but relatively uncluttered.

Mr. Bourne has certainly taken possession of Tim Burton’s 1990 film, personalizing and theatricalizing it so that his adaptation does not seem like a derivation. He sets it in his favorite late 1950s/early 1960s milieu, adding his own plotline wrinkles. His closest collaborator is set and costume designer Lez Brotherston. Saturated with the sickly pastels of the late Eisenhower years, Mr. Brotherston’s production values parallel, without mimicking, the production values of the film. Both men know what to exaggerate and what to telescope visually and kinetically.

The stage production follows the overall outline of the film, in which a laboratory grounded inventor attempts to create an animatronic replica of his dead son, but dies before he can finish work on the creature, who is left with scissors in place of hands. Edward Scissorhands must leave his incubus and venture out into a world alternately baffling, provoking, and highly stimulating.

Mrs. Boggs, a young matron, adopts him and takes him to live with her suburban family, who exist amidst a cornucopia of local “types,” drawn from many socioeconomic strata — there is a cute scene in which all the families are out for a drive, each clutching a steering wheel.

Next door is Mrs. Monroe, who is not quite Potiphar’s wife by way of Mrs. Robinson. She’s got a nerdy husband, a daughter, and a gay son. Soon Mrs. Monroe is after Edward, played by Sam Archer. But he is in love with the Boggses’ cheerleading daughter Kim. In his bedroom, wearing pajamas over his carapace, Edward performs the first of two dream ballets, in which the cheerleader’s portraits come to life and dance with him.

Later, after Edward’s topiarytrimming ability grants him acceptance in the community, he watches Kim and her boyfriend fight at a poolside party. Edward then consoles her, and, in a dream ballet, imagines his hands are human and that he and Kim are dancing together, accompanied by a corps de ballet of dancing topiary. But her boyfriend returns, Kim forgives him, and Edward raises his scissor-laden extremities in anguish as the first-act curtain falls.

Act II opens with the ribbon cutting on “Salon Eduardo,” for Edward has found in hairdressing another vehicle for his particular physiology. There’s a seduction adagio with Mrs. Monroe, before Edward’s undoing at a Christmas party. He gets drunk, loses control, and his scissors spark an electrical explosion in the Christmas tree, injuring Kim’s brother Kevin. The community turns on Edward, and Kim’s boyfriend’s jealousy proves fatal.

In Mr. Bourne’s adaptation, a live orchestra plays Terry Davies’s score, a reorchestrated medley of themes from Danny Elfman’s film soundtrack that still sounds like movie music. It’s clear in the rave-ups drawn from period social-dance and in the more balleticized dream ballets that Mr. Bourne has a vocabulary and can construct a dance. And his dancers are good in just the right way; their proficiency doesn’t distract from the overall momentum of the storytelling.

But it’s as a stager that Mr. Bourne’s real gifts shine. He keeps the ball rolling, overlaps scenes, paralleling peripheral incidents with primary ones. He moves people and production elements around slickly. He is expert at short-hand gesture, planting visual clues and thumbnail personification, and he knows how often to repeat running gags and trademark tropes. As in his “Swan Lake,” a woman parades a pet dog on roller skates. It’s funny when she does it in the first act of “Edward Scissorhands” and it’s still funny when she does it again in the second act.

Mr. Bourne’s production is not out of place in a concert setting like the BAM opera house, but it could easily work on Broadway, just as his “Swan Lake” and its allmale flock did in 1998. Watching Friday’s performance, I engaged in idle speculation about whether Mr. Bourne was attracted to the character of Edward Scissorhands as a symbol of the outsider/misfit, like Odette in “Swan Lake.” To what degree as well, I wondered, did he calculate that the proven success of the property could make it a good bet for transference to the stage with a large ready-made audience among children. Both motivations could easily coexist, and where one ends and the other begins may be impossible to chart, and perhaps irrelevant. Each is equally legitimate and instrumental in the effectiveness of a theatrical project.

But there is a safeness to Mr. Bourne’s “Scissorhands” that wasn’t present in “Swan Lake” or his “Play Without Words,” which came to BAM’s Harvey in 2005. The image presented by Scissorhands is more outré than Odette (whether in male or female personifications), and yet the controlling sentiment in this production is more prosaic, bordering at times on innocuous schmaltz. There’s schmaltz in the film, too, particularly in the way it (as well as Mr. Bourne’s adaptation) frames the story in the reminiscences of the now-elderly Kim Boggs. But if Mr. Bourne does not really go out on a limb in his latest production, his compromises don’t offend — he is to diverting a showman for that.

Until March 31 (30 Lafeyette Ave., Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).