The stuffed-to-the-gills passions and plotlines of “Les Misérables,” the finest by a wide margin of the through-sung British imports that flooded Broadway in the 1980s, have resurfaced in an economy-size package. The experience is akin to drinking light beer with a dear old friend who’s been away for a while: a terrific night out as long as you don’t remind yourself how hearty the original brew was. Producer Cameron Mackintosh’s leaner, greener restaging is everything you always wanted in an iconic pop opera — and less.

This stirring compression of Victor Hugo’s 1,300-page, decades-spanning saga was and is a milestone in musical theater. Back in 1987, using refreshingly little scenery beyond a makeshift barricade and an ever-spinning turntable, co-directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird packed revolutionary fervor, low comedy, metaphysical musings, cute kids, theological crises, and a hearty love triangle into three revelatory hours of stagecraft. All of 19th-century Paris seemed to glut the stage.

Well, a few arrondisements didn’t make it this time, not to mention a substantial number of the musicians that brought Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s score to lush life the first time around. The resulting dip in vibrancy, coupled with several bizarre casting choices, has dimmed the show’s luster somewhat. But it will take more than a pinched penny here and a questionable performance there to negate this show’s bountiful charms.

Even with massive swaths of Hugo’s plot skipped over, “Les Misérables” still covers extensive ground. Briefly: The saintly sinner Jean Valjean (Alexander Gemignani) emerges from 19 years of hard labor and quickly finds himself in violations of his parole, the obsessive inspector Javert (Norm Lewis) perpetually at his heels.

After a quick vignette involving the doomed prostitute Fantine (Daphne Rubin-Vega), the two men find themselves enmeshed in the ill-fated Paris revolutions of 1832, a debacle that ultimately incorporates Fantine’s daughter, Cosette (Ali Ewoldt), now under Valjean’s care; Marius (Adam Jacobs), the idealistic student who loves Cosette; Eponine (Celia Keenan-Bolger), the dirty-faced angel who loves him; and the Thénardiers (Gary Beach and Jenny Galloway), a pair of Dickensian scoundrels out to bilk all of the above.

While the lyrics of Mr. Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel (translated from the French by Herbert Kretzmer and James Fenton) may land a bit stiffly, Mr. Schönberg’s rapturous score cures an awful lot of ills. It may belong to the Andrew Lloyd Webber School of Motivic Development — i.e., if you find a melody that works, assign it to anyone, anywhere, under any circumstances — but, man, are they extraordinary melodies. The Act I finale features probably Broadway’s canniest example of contrapuntal storytelling since “West Side Story,” and songs like “Stars” and “A Heart Full of Love,” and at least a half-dozen others, pack just as much of a punch as ever.

(Another one of them, “Bring Him Home,” is just as gorgeous now as it was in 1904, when Puccini wrote it. In fact, it’s possibly better, as it furthers the plot more than the “humming chorus,” the “Madama Butterfly” melody to which Mr. Schönberg, ahem, pays tribute.)

The casting is almost willfully strange, with several gambles paying off and a few fizzling. Firmly in the former category is Ms. Keenan-Bolger, who gives Eponine a gentler, more “legit” sound than usual. Mr. Beach’s typical roles tend to be swishier than the amoral Thénardier, but his tongue-lolling, pigeon-toed cavortings, not to mention his Cockney-Parisian-in-Texas accent, prevent the ballad-heavy action from getting too soupy. (Ms. Galloway, visiting from London, is even better as his slatternly wife.) And Mr. Lewis, last seen flirting and dancing his way through “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” is perhaps the best singer to ever try his hand at the relentless and deceptively difficult role of Javert.

Mr. Gemignani, however, is a bit of a cipher. He has marvelous breath control and a seemingly effortless, honeyed tenor that does wonders with Valjean’s more operatic passages. But this gifted performer, whose 30th birthday is still a few years down the road, is far too young for a character who ages two decades onstage after his 19 years in jail.

The weariness that pervades Valjean’s valedictory actions in Act II is nowhere to be found, and while Mr. Gemignani finds a number of humanizing touches to his messianic character — I rather liked his relieved giggle after one of several near-misses with Javert — the effort is always visible. Should this “Les Misérables” last as long as the previous production, I suspect he would make a superb Valjean in 2022. As for now, I’m not so sure.

Mr. Jacobs’s Marius, meanwhile, is paper-thin, and Ms. Rubin-Vega — who has parlayed her “Rent” fame into insightful work in plays and musicals — never stands a chance. She does everything she can to coax Fantine’s signature song, “I Dreamed a Dream,” into her sultry vocal range; none of it works.

This unusually spotty cast is yet another sign of what would appear to be Mr. Mackintosh’s conflicted interests. Financially unwilling to present a whole-hog, full-size revival, yet creatively wary of going the stylized route seen in last year’s innovative “Sweeney Todd,” he essentially triangulates. He delivers tourist-friendly spectacle at bottom-line-friendly prices.

There’s a dirty secret on Broadway wherein musicals quietly shed a few musicians once the Tony Awards are handed out and the tourists in the audience have begun to outnumber the New Yorkers. It’s as if “Les Misérables,” which has been on Broadway for 18 of the last 20 years (the original production breathed its last breath in 2003), has just followed this continuum and used the hiatus to purge a few extra bodies while — literally — nobody was looking. The newly streamlined orchestrations by Christopher Jahnke and Stephen Metcalf may have shed some of the more dated synthesizer sequences, but too many passages sound meager and understaffed.

“Long run-itis” can have a deleterious effect on shows; in fact, “Les Misérables” made headlines a decade into its Broadway run when Mr. Mackintosh tried to fire the entire cast and start over fresh. (Actors’ Equity had plenty to say about this, as long-timers make higher salaries, and a handful of veterans stayed on.) So maybe “Les Misérables” just needed a breather in order to freshen up and take its rightful place among its less illustrious pop-opera peers (including its new next-door neighbor, “The Phantom of the Opera”). But the show lost a little weight while it was away, and the new look isn’t so flattering.

Open run (235 W. 44th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).