In the 1950s, the Belgian chanteur Jacques Brel haunted the cabarets of Paris, performing his sharp-tongued songs with feverish, almost violent emotion. By the early 1960s, the provincial-looking folk singer was an international touring star. In 1968, a couple of New Yorkers staged a musical revue of his songs that captured the imagination of a rebellious generation; “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris” ran for five straight years. Now, the director Gordon Greenberg has brilliantly resurrected “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well” at the funky Zipper Theatre, in a spine-tingling production that gets just about everything right.

The show was first staged with the four singers on stools, but Mr. Greenberg’s version lets the characters move and create scenes. Mr. Greenberg drops the 28 songs of “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well” into a simple set – a dusty Paris apartment with old plush furniture, cluttered with bric-a-brac and half-empty brandy snifters. There are sometimes full-group numbers, with marvelous vaudeville-style choreography. More often there is one soloist lit cabaret-style, moving through the dream of the song, while the other characters drop into dim chairs and wait.

Mr. Greenberg has the good sense to try to re-create the special atmosphere and intimacy of Brel’s songs. He doesn’t try to pump them up into rock ballads, he doesn’t distract us from the singing with excessive effects. He sets the musical roughly in the late 1960s, backs the singers with a small band (on piano, accordion, guitar, bass, and drums), and puts the spotlight squarely on the lone singer.

For the few minutes the soloist is singing, the full weight of the show is on those lonely shoulders. And to see an actor go fully into a song on an intimate stage is a heady form of theater.

The four perfectly cast singers in “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well” have both the range and the smarts to pull off these songs. How do they give it to us, that direct, all-or-nothing performance, while simultaneously suggesting an atmosphere of French cigarettes and late-night cafes, postwar disillusionment and 60’s chic? I don’t know, but they do give it, and it’s an exhilarating experience.

And Brel’s songs hold up in this atmosphere.The melodies, the wildly diverse rhythms and lyrics (in superb translations by Eric Blau and Mort Shulman) fascinate. They tell stories, so that you wait for each verse to develop the plot. Then, to your delight, the stories take sudden sharp twists that can be devastating, funny, or surprisingly sweet.

The late Brel was an acid-tongued critic of war, class discrimination, and all forms of hypocrisy. But he was no old-fashioned moralist; his conclusions were more subtle and mixed than that. He preached love (most famously in his hit, “If We Only Have Love”) and compassion for the downtrodden and damaged. But it is part of Brel’s deep melancholy that the author of these songs of ten seemed impervious to something as delicate as love.

The four performers play various characters in the songs, but overall they divide roughly into two couples, one older and one younger. Robert Cuccioli’s character is the most like Brel – a tough assignment, but one that the extraordinarily talented Mr. Cuccioli (the original “Jekyll and Hyde”) lives up to. His rendition of the hilarious and bizarre “Jacky” is the best thing in the show – absurd,winking,angry,and sincere all at once, with an inspired, loony dance (by the first-rate choreographer, Mark Dendy). Mr. Cuccioli captures some of the older Brel’s self-destructive darkness, and some of his sweaty, hyper performance style, without ever trying to imitate him.

The American actress Gay Marshall, who has lived for 20 years in Paris,plays the older chanteuse, delivering some Brel classics (“Ne Me Quitte Pas,” “Marieke”) in the original French and Flemish. But Ms. Marshall provides more than just the right accent.She has warm eyes and a throaty Edith Piaf sound, and she suggests the flinty strength of the women who lived through World War II in Europe.

The younger couple consists of Rodney Hicks (“Rent”), who portrays a soldier in the French army in the 1950s, and Natascia Diaz, whose pure, sweet soprano is a perfect match for her character, an innocent crushed by the dirty city. Mr. Hicks is a scorching presence in “Next,” a song by a soldier taken to a mobile prostitution unit to lose his virginity. Ms. Diaz is visibly moved by the material; as she sang the beautifully sad “Old Folks” her eyes were shining, and when she got to “You’re Not Alone,” a tear dropped from her cheek.

Brel’s songs – and these performers’ renditions of them – are everything big Broadway musicals are not – acoustic, intimate, and disturbingly raw. In the space of a few hours, this show drops in on bitter veterans, failed love affairs, destitute people, and – most unusual of all – a scathingly self-critical voice that picks apart its attitudes about class and grapples with its own fear of death.

The songs of the new production are not the songs the way Brel sang them – with sweat and fever in a smoky bar.Mr. Greenberg’s show instead tries to do what the songs do – to conjure a story in the imagination. He succeeds with Broadway caliber stars but without Broadway bluster; this is an intimate show, a real cabaret. But it avoids feeling like a bunch of songs strung together, thanks to a sustained arc and some of the best stage choreography to be seen in New York. This “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris” is moving, human-scale theater of a kind that is rarely found anywhere nowadays. I hope it runs for another few thousand performances.

Until July 9 (336 W. 37th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, 212-239-6200).