Disney’s Beauty & the Beast

…The visually dazzling and magnificently sung staging of “Beauty and the Beast” running through Jan. 19 at Aurora’s opulent Paramount Theatre is So. So. Good. I’m about as romantic as Tuesday morning at the DMV, yet I found myself getting a positively misty when Paul-Jordan Jansen’s charismatic Beast sent his good god y’all vocals soaring over the vast theater like a sunrise. “If I Can’t Love Her” is an opera distilled into a single love song, and it is extraordinary.

…But what matters most is the heartfelt tone of the show, which some productions have gotten spectacularly wrong. Not only is Beth Stafford Laird all-in, all night, but the scenes between her Belle and her pops (Ron Rains) are very touching, as is old Cogsworth (George Keating), realizing with his old pal Lumiere (Jackson Evans) that his worst fears have not come true. The princess-dress crowd probably won’t get that, and let’s hope they don’t for years to come, but their parents will.