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In order for a staging of The Winter's Tale to succeed, a director needs to accomplish two things. The first challenge comes within moments of the play's start. Leontes, King of Sicilia (Simon Russell Beale) must credibly turn from a man who's genuinely enjoying the company of his wife Hermione (Rebecca Hall) and lifelong friend Polixenes (Josh Hamilton) to a man so suspicious that these two are having an affair that he's willing to commit murder. The second challenge presented by the play comes roughly at its halfway mark when, after tragedy has befallen Leontes and his family, the play turns into a bucolic romp in Bohemia, where Polixenes rules. In the production of "Tale," which opened over the weekend at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the second in the trans-Atlantic Bridge Project, director Sam Mendes ably overcomes each of these hurdles and the result is an exceptional evening of Shakespearean theater.

It's a combination of production elements and Beale's carefully calibrated performance that ensures that Mendes' sure-handedly elegant production clears the first hurdle. After theatergoers have seen the three interacting with easy familiarity and warmth, Paul Pyant's lighting design dims while Beale's Leontes standouts out underneath the glare of spotlight and Paul Arditti's splendid soundscape takes on an eerie quality. Taken together, audiences understand that Leontes' reaction to Hermione's friendship with Polixenes stems from long-standing insecurity, and thus, the man's quickly violent passions – including an order to Camillo (played with both gentility and gravity by Paul Jesson) to kill Polixenes - are readily accepted.

Leontes' jealousy sends the very pregnant Hermione into premature labor, and after giving birth to a daughter, she dies. The king orders the infant to be taken from the kingdom and abandoned – a task left to the unfortunate Atingonus (a wryly amusing Dakin Matthews) as retribution for the exhortations on Hermione and the child's behalf made by his wife Paulina (a intelligently and movingly crafted performance from Sinéad Cusack).

The events lead to the play's center section, where the tragedy of what's preceded disappears, and theatergoers are treated to rustic revelry on the island of Bohemia. Sixteen years have passed. Leontes daughter, Perdita (Morven Christie), has been raised by an elderly shepherd (Richard Easton in a particularly amusing turn) and his dimwitted son (a loveable turn from Tobias Segal). Perdita has also fallen in love with Florizel (Michael Braun), Polixenes' son, and at the shepherd's sheep-shearing celebration, Polixenes and Camillo, who's been serving this king after spiriting him out of Sicilia, come to the party disguised to see if the reports they've heard about Florizel's affection for Perdita are true. The bawdiness and merriment of this section of "Tale" often stand in sharp and uneasy contrast to the first portion, but here, Mendes makes sure that the gravity of Polixenes' presence at the event is unmistakable, and with this, combined with Ethan Hawke's darkly mercurial portrayal of Autolycus, a rogue who's come to scam all of the partygoers, the extreme disjoint of Shakespeare's play suddenly almost seems completely natural.

The result is that by the time the action shifts back to Bohemia, theatergoers have been both moved and amused, and thus, the fairy tale ending that waits in store for Leontes and the rest has an almost inescapable emotional impact. These are characters for whom theatergoers have come to care, almost unquestioningly, and a happy end seems to be the only just thing for them all. It's rare that this romance, one of the trickiest in the canon, can inspire both extremes of emotions in audiences while telling the story in what feels to be a lucid, unified manner, and theatergoers should certainly consider a trip to BAM before this limited engagement ends.

---- Andy Propst

The Winter's Tale plays at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Harvy Theatre (651 Fulton Street). Performances are February 28, March 4 – 6 & March 8 at 7:30pm; and March 1 and 7 at 2pm. Tickets are $30-$90 and can be purchased by calling 212-636-4100 or by visiting www.bam.org.