Rebecca Hall and Simon Russell Beale endure marital frost.

Among the frustrations of writing reviews for a weekly magazine is that sometimes one’s review appears in print too late to do readers any good, since all the remaining tickets have already been sold. The extraordinary production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at BAM is at strong risk of falling into that category: The production, which closes on March 8, is almost completely sold out. So rather than waiting until next week’s issue to discuss the play, we’ll simply gush about it a bit on this blog, and encourage you to buy a seat right away if you can. (To order tickets, go here. And if you happen to live near BAM, it’s definitely worth your while to try your luck at the cancellation line, where you can often benefit from no-shows by subscribers.)

Reflections on the play are after the break.

Directed with elegant clarity by Sam Mendes, The Winter’s Tale forms half of the Anglo-American venture known as the Bridge Project. It is being presented in rep with Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, which I saw several weeks ago and admired without finding it especially moving. I was expecting to feel similarly about The Winter’s Tale, whose temporal and dramaturgical shifts are notoriously hard to pull off. Instead, I found myself deeply affected by Mendes’s elegant and emotionally resonant staging, and by the play’s complex arc of guilt and, perhaps, redemption.

Principal among the production’s many attractions is the superb Leontes of Simon Russell Beale, who—with his usual, paradoxical brand of tossed-off intensity—elucidates some of the darkest verse in all of Shakespeare. The first three acts of The Winter’s Tale are similar in plot to Othello: They both feature a noble man who falsely suspects his virtuous wife of infidelity. The difference is that here there is no Iago to blame for the main character’s murderous jealousy: It comes unbidden and unjustified from the recesses of his own mind. Many actors suggest this process by becoming brooding and hard, but Beale brilliantly takes a different tack: He’s neurotic and fussy, and insecure about his own authority. (Even in his explanatory asides to the audience, he seems to be pleading for our understanding.) His Leontes is not merely more sympathetic, but also more modern, and it gives the play a fresh richness of feeling.

The transatlantic ensemble really delivers for Mendes here. The wronged wife, Hermione, is played with warm, hurt dignity by Rebecca Hall. Sinéad Cusack’s Paulina is a model of stately command, and Paul Jesson finds undertones of sentiment as the loyal Camillo. Ethan Hawke, barefoot and smelly-looking, gives a fresh spin to the roguish Autolycus, filling out his troubadour songs with a troublesome rasp. And Richard Easton and Tobias Segal have broad, merry fun as the clownish shepherd and his son.

It is true, as some reviewers have noted elsewhere, that the pastoral comedy of Act IV—set 16 years after the play’s first half—comes off somewhat less well than the sections dealing with domestic strife. This is partly because the material, as written, is so jarringly different from what comes before it, and also because the actors playing the young lovers Perdita and Florizel in these sequences are not quite as appealing as they should be. (Elizabeth Reaser and Gene Farber were superior in Classic Stage Company’s otherwise forgettable 2003 production.) But Mendes smartly tarts up the action with music and dance, including a bawdy hoedown that features enormous balloon breasts and phalli. Is it vulgar? Yes, but that’s the point: It helps explain the otherwise ugly reaction of Florizel’s royal father Polixines (Josh Hamilton, struggling a bit with the verse) to his romance with the ostensibly low-born Perdita.

I could write about this show all day, but you’d be better-off seeing it for yourself. Spring is still officially a few weeks away, but it comes early in The Winter’s Tale. Try to be there for the bloom.