If you scurried past the Coaster Theatre about 7 p.m. on that cold east-windy Friday night a couple of weeks ago, your hands jammed deep in your pockets and your scarf wrapped snug about your neck, you might have noticed a cozy, festive crowd taking their seats inside. And if promises to keep kept you from opening night, you might make plans to join that crowd at the theater a little later this holiday season.

Lisa Fergus makes her directing debut as she and a cast of 26 present the musical Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” at the Coaster Theatre in Cannon Beach.

“Beauty and the Beast” has enjoyed various incarnations since Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont wrote her fairy tale “La Belle et la Bête” nearly 250 years ago. Though French students and cinephiles may know Jean Cocteau’s dark 1946 film version, no version has seized and retained modern attention like Walt Disney’s playful 1991 animation.

“Who’s not familiar with it?” wonders Coaster Theatre Executive Director Patrick Lathrop.

Nearly all of us are, and Lathrop expects to attract a diverse audience of folks just like us who cherish their memories of the Disney animation.

Amanda Payne is Belle, the precocious, independent-minded daughter of the village’s eccentric inventor, Maurice (David Hayes), who trades captive places with her father in a bewitched castle where the good-natured denizens are slowly but certainly becoming household objects, and the prince (Richard Bowman) an unsightly beast, unless he finds true love pretty soon. That magical rose is losing its final petals.

The Coaster Theatre — whose recent holiday musicals have included “Scrooge! The Musical,” Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” “My Fair Lady” and “Hello Dolly,” all ambitious shows beloved by a great spectrum of theater fans — had been considering Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” for its holiday musical for a couple of years before it was able to secure it for 2014. Those of us who simply show up to enjoy productions sometimes don’t appreciate the business decisions involved in producing Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” a show that, unlike, for example, one of Shakespeare’s plays, isn’t yet part of the public domain. The Coaster must acquire performance rights to assure that the theater won’t be competing with other performances in the region. Then the theater must pay royalties of up to $400 per performance.

“Musicals are more expensive than plays because there are more creators to pay,” Lathrop explains. “The more popular the musical, the more expensive royalties are.” Furthermore, Disney exercises tight control over details such as who may sponsor the show. “We’ve never had anybody want to approve our sponsors before, but,” he concedes, “it makes sense.”

Lathrop, who also designs the sets and costumes, has recreated costumes and sets as close to the original as the Coaster Theatre’s intimate conditions allow. His attention to the details of the villagers’ French provincial clothing and to the baroque lines of the human furniture is painstaking. “We want people to come and see what they’re expecting to see when they think of Disney and ‘Beauty and the Beast,’” he says.

But it wasn’t easy.

“This show needed an engineer because I had to develop geometric shapes, not just costumes,” he explains. Most of the characters, such as Lumière the candelabra, aren’t human-shaped. “We’ve got a teapot, a clock, salt and pepper shakers, a beer stein. One character is a wardrobe. I couldn’t see how we could fit her backstage, so I went for the vanity look,” Lathrop says. “The bottom half of her is furniture, but the top half is still human. The actress, poor thing, she can’t sit down.”

Fans of the Disney animation will recognize their favorite songs. Ellen Blankenship, who plays the kindly teakettle Mrs. Potts, sings the show’s eponymous theme song. “’Beauty and the Beast’ is the iconic song from the musical,” she says. “Right up there with ‘Climb Every Mountain’ from ‘The Sound of Music,’” which Blankenship has also performed.

Those of us who sing mostly in cars and showers might find the music intimidating, but this cast doesn’t. “They’re well-known and beautiful melodies, but they’re not necessarily difficult musically to sing,” offers Lathrop. “And all four soloists are well-accomplished singers, so it’s not such a challenge to sing these songs well.”

Daren Hull, who plays Lumière agrees. “The creators are brilliant craftspeople who make beautiful music that is complex but easy to sing.”

Bowman, the Beast, on the other hand, doesn’t entirely concur. “I was surprised when I saw the sheet music,” he says. “‘If I Can’t Love Her’ has been one of my staples since I was 17. But I’d never seen so many triplets in a row. They have to be counted out very specifically otherwise you’re thrown off time with the accompanist.”

“It’s a highly ambitious musical, particularly for our little theater,” says Lathrop, “but I think we’re going to pull it off and do a lovely job with it.”

If ever there’s a season to celebrate fantasy, make-believe and fairy tales, the next festive weeks are it. So some weekend soon, you might scuttle down to the Coaster, out of the cold and into the theater to join that crowd for an evening rekindling fond memories of old Disney friends.