Fierce, chameleon-like and attention-grabbing, actor and singer Imran Hylton has impressed audiences with his versatility of characters, from militant straight to gaudy drag.

Hylton discovered an interest in performing at age 12 thanks to drama club. Since then, his passion has led him to perform with various theatrical companies including Loxen Productions, Robert Russell Theater and Miami New Drama. He has worked with Area Stage Company (ASC) for nearly two years, and in that short time has caught the eye of theatergoers in Miami.

I thought I was done with Beauty and the Beast.

Having experienced two or three regional productions of the Academy Award-winning film-turned-stage musical, I assumed it was one of those contemporary warhorses that precluded individualistic interpretation. You know the shows—ubiquitous crowd-pleasers like Mamma Mia! and Avenue Q—that are so driven by audience expectations that deviation from the brand is all but unthinkable. In the same way, how could any production of Beauty and the Beast approach the material with a fundamentally new vision without, to borrow some political argot, alienating the base?

“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” took immersion to a different level on Broadway in 2018. Now enter the Area Stage Company version of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast.”

The show is performing to nearly sold-out crowds at Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in its Carnival Studio Theater, currently transformed by set designer Frank Oliva into an amalgamation of a French medieval castle and a small-town 16th-century pub, where dancing on the tables takes on a whole new meaning.

We might know the “tale as old as time,” but I know I’ve never been in it. Now, with the Adrienne Arsht Center’s latest show “Beauty and the Beast,” the audience will feel like they belong to the world of Belle and Beast, fit with talking tea pots, dancing candle sticks, all waiting for you to be their guest!

True as it can be, “Beauty and the Beast” is coming to the Adrienne Arsht Center.

Area Stage Company’s new immersive production of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” is, as the French would say, magnifique.

Presented in a transformed Carnival Studio Theater at Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, the show is a two-year labor of love and creativity on the part of Giancarlo Rodaz, Area Stage’s associate artistic director. Working with numerous collaborators, the young director has achieved a larger-scale success on the order of his immensely popular immersive version of “Annie,” which the company presented in June of 2021, in the company’s smaller South Miami theater.