What is the ideal way to approach a classic? As Court Theatre's artistic director Charles Newell has demonstrated so often in recent years -- most notably in his X-ray-like take on "The Glass Menagerie" last season -- one good way is to strip it bare and expose its bones and sinews.

Once that process is complete, the whole thing can be reconstructed with nothing but those pieces absolutely essential to keeping the organism's heart and soul working at peak capacity. Radical? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.

Newell has applied this technique once again with his revival of "Raisin," the rarely produced 1973 musical version of Lorraine Hansberry's Chicago-bred classic, "A Raisin in the Sun," a play that first took Broadway by storm in 1959 and was both of its time and decades ahead of it.

Newell's production, which opened Saturday, gets off to a slow start. But take heed: It eventually delivers a knockout punch that sends you reeling.

The musical -- with a book by Robert Nemiroff (Hansberry's husband) and Charlotte Zaltzberg that Newell has filled out with more dialogue from the play, and a score by Judd Woldin and Robert Brittan (revised by musical director Doug Peck to suit a jazz band rather than a Broadway orchestra) -- is more a play with music than a traditional musical. Individual song titles are not even listed in the program. Yet it abides by that first rule of musicals that says the characters break into song when their emotions can no longer be contained.

And even if you ache for more music, when the songs do emerge -- as a spat between husband and wife, or a song of their passionate reconnection, or a teasing song for a mother with a young son, or an African-inspired ode, or a gospel rouser, or the explosive rant of a man who believes he has been robbed of his dreams -- they are natural, powerful extensions of the action.

The story unspools with the band perched on an upstage platform and all the performers seated around the spare stage as if they were an extension of the audience. By doing this, Newell suggests this quintessentially South Side story is being acted out at a church or community meeting where we are crucial witness-participants. In fact, the racially restrictive housing covenants that Hansberry's family challenged in court in 1937 (covenants upheld at the time by the University of Chicago) were the direct source of her play. So the production is literally right at home.

Set in the 1950s, "Raisin" is set in motion by the arrival of a life insurance payout of $10,000 to Lena Younger (Ernestine Jackson), the widow of steelworker Walter Younger. Lena is the powerful matriarch who rules the roost in the bleak apartment she shares with her son, Walter Lee (David St. Louis), a chauffeur; his wife, Ruth (Harriet Nzinga Plumpp); their young son, Travis (sweet-voiced Scott Baity Jr.), and Walter's college-age sister, Beneatha (Malkia Stampley).

The question at hand is: Whose dreams will be satisfied by the money? Will Lena buy the house and garden she has dreamed of for decades? Will the money pay tuition for Beneatha, who plans to become a doctor? Or will Lena entrust the lion's share of this windfall -- her late husband's blood money -- to her son? Walter craves a stake in his own business -- a liquor store venture with two friends. But is he able to handle the money? And will Lena allow him to become a man on his own terms, and to succeed or fail as such?

In casting "Raisin," Newell has tapped some spectacular talent new to Chicago, as well as several veterans, and his choices are ideal. The production reaches its full force only in the second act, but when it does, it grabs hold.

The black writer-director George C. Wolfe once referred to Hansberry's work in half-mocking, half-worshipful terms as "the big mama on the couch play." Newell has gone against that stereotype here, casting Jackson -- a lean, small-boned woman of grace and elegance -- as Lena. Jackson (who played Ruth in the original Broadway cast of "Raisin"), speaks softly, but when it's time for her to erupt she does so in mighty fashion.

The real volcano here, however, is St. Louis, a Washington, D.C.-bred actor who arrives with regional theater credits matched by extensive film and television work. A riveting performer, with a sensual, deeply masculine presence (and a perfectly shaved skull that only adds to his luminosity), he brings a crackling fire and immense volatility to the role of Walter. St. Louis is a very hot property, and you can only hope he will not leave town once this run is over.

Also new to Chicago is Stampley, whose energy and humor (and equally beautiful shaved skull) are luminous in their own right. Her Beneatha -- the budding bohemian in search of her black identity -- provides the comic relief in the show. But Stampley, who moves like a dream, is an all-round charmer. And her scenes with Travis Turner, a recent Northwestern University grad who already has accrued quite a list of Chicago credits (and who is most winning here as Joseph Asagai, the young Nigerian intellectual who introduces Beneatha to her "roots"), could not be more winning.

As the good wife and mother who knows her husband's strengths and weaknesses, but also can hold her own, Plumpp is a lovely counterpoint to St. Louis. Joslyn Jones adds spice as a wise but envious neighbor. And Sean Blake helps raise the roof along with fellow gospel singers Michele Cason, Neda Spears and Robert Cornelius.

hweiss@suntimes.com

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