A lively cast and staging lift a potentially tiresome work

You may be forgiven for not even knowing, as most people don’t, that Shakespeare wrote a play called Pericles. Not only is this wildly irregular work almost never produced, but a wide academic consensus holds that the Bard penned only the second half of it, which seems obvious even to nonscholarly eyes. The first part is a frantic Aegean adventure tale of kings and riddles and wrecks at sea, perhaps better suited to a puppet show than to a stage; the second is a poetically rich sequence of scenes that strongly prefigures The Winter’s Tale. Despite some beautiful passages, Pericles is like a hybrid from Greek myth: the head of a noble lion grafted onto the body of a bucking donkey.