Before the Fall is the best musical most people under forty have never heard, and Domenica Vásquez’s production at the Hargrove Theatre is the reason it finally gets to fix that. This is not a restoration piece, not a museum exhibit. It is a living, breathing argument for why Luisa Carrión’s 1968 score belongs in the same conversation as any American musical of the last century — and for the first time, it’s being made by people who believe it.

For the uninitiated: Before the Fall follows the Ibarra family across one week in October 1962, Miami, during the missile crisis. The original book by Carlos Moreno threads three generations of this household — grandmother, daughter, granddaughter — into a story about what you hold on to when everything might end. It ran eight months in its original Broadway production, picked up nominations for Best Score that it deserved to win, and then largely disappeared from the repertoire because the original vocal contractor buried the orchestrations in a licensing dispute that wasn’t resolved until 2019. The show has been waiting. It was owed a moment like this one.

Vásquez opens the piece with all the lights up — work lights, practically. The Hargrove’s house exposed, nothing hidden. And then, as the grandmother Esperanza begins singing “La Última Noche” to an empty stage, the rig descends and transforms around her while she holds the note. It’s the kind of theatrical statement that tells you exactly what kind of director you’re dealing with. Esto, she’s saying, this is what I think this show is about. And she’s right.

Esperanza is played by Selena Reyes, and I want to be precise about what Reyes is doing: she is not playing old. She is playing someone who has already survived the worst version of her life and is watching, quietly, to see if her family is going to have to do the same. The restraint is surgical. In the second act, when Reyes finally breaks into full voice for “Everything Familiar,” she doesn’t announce it — the voice simply arrives, like weather, and the audience at the Saturday matinee I attended went completely still. Not the studied silence of people being respectful. The silence of people who forgot to breathe.

The granddaughter, Marisol, is played by Alejandra Dominguez in her Broadway debut, and Dominguez is almost there. Her voice is spectacular — she makes the filigree of “What the Radio Said” sound effortless, which it is not — but she’s still playing the emotion of each scene rather than its undercurrent. The gap between her and Reyes is noticeable. Though I’ll say this: the gap narrows as the night goes on. Watch what she does in the scene just before intermission. She’s learning in real time.

The orchestra — a twelve-piece ensemble under conductor Rafaela Cruz — is the third star of this production. Carrión’s score depends on a particular harmonic instability, the way a wrong resolution sets up the next song’s emotional displacement, and Cruz does not flatten it out. The arrangements feel dangerous in the best way. They refuse to be pretty when the show is asking them to be unresolved.

There are things that don’t work. The middle daughter, Elena, played by Vivienne Okafor, is given the show’s one underwritten role, and neither Okafor nor Vásquez has figured out how to fix the book problem at its core. Elena exists to embody denial — denial that war is coming, that her mother is dying, that her daughter is becoming someone she doesn’t recognize — and the material doesn’t give her enough variation in register. Okafor is too skilled an actor to let it ruin scenes, but she deserves a production that meets her halfway. It doesn’t.

Still — ay, mija — still. This is the production Before the Fall has been waiting nearly sixty years for, and whatever its seams, it earns what it’s reaching for.

You should go. Go for Selena Reyes, and stay for the moment in Act Two when Vásquez trusts this score to do exactly what it was always capable of doing, and it does. A show this willing to demand something from its audience is rarer than you think. I will take a beautiful, imperfect revival over a careful nothing every single time.

Estamos aquí.