'Pericles' ' saucy mayhem makes for stage magic

If the gods - the ones Shakepeare's characters are constantly beseeching - could awaken the Bard for just one season of theater, they'd plop him onto the East Coast, for sure.

Here, the Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival is doing for his little-produced

Pericles, Prince of Tyre

what Lincoln Center did earlier this season for his even-less-produced

Cymbeline

. They're transforming a confusing mess of a plot - both plays suffer more twists than a decent Philly pretzel - into a riveting, beautiful piece of stage magic.

What's more, Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival is doing

Pericles

in its space on Sansom Street, about a fifth the size of Broadway's Lincoln Center Theater. And spending a pittance, compared with a Broadway budget.

Incest! Famine! Political plotting! Murder! Killer storms! Prostitutes!

Pericles

has enough saucy mayhem to ink the National Enquirer for months. I read the disjointed muddle of a play for the first time within minutes of seeing the Festival's opening Friday night. I was dazed.

Scholars say it's doubtful Shakespeare wrote the first 40 percent; he took on the remainder late in his career, possibly as the Elizabethan equivalent of a script doctor. Indeed, only the second half bubbles with fine language.

Nothing proves that a great production can overcome a tough play better than the staging by Carmen Khan, the Shakespeare Festival's artistic director. She started with a well-massaged script from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Then she ripped out the Bard's narrator, energizing his lines by creating a masked chorus that sings them to Fabian Obispo's music. (Obispo did the show's captivating sound design - but the decibel level and intense bass overwhelm much singing in the first half.)

Khan then forced zing on the pacing that makes the play feel as if it's being done in chapters - not the disconnected pieces of writing you get when you read

Pericles

.

The cast, performing

Pericles

in repertory with

Romeo and Juliet

, play it like they own it. In their hands, it's not just accessible, it's charming, this story of a prince who discovers that the dream princess he desires, in a neighboring kingdom, is sleeping with her dad. He returns home, dejected, then flees after realizing the neighboring king is now out to kill him.

Thus begins his dizzying odyssey, which takes him through two brutal sea storms (thumbs up for Jerrold R. Forsyth's lighting) and into several curious nations.

Damon Bonetti's Pericles sizzles - commanding when necessary, playful if it seems right, abject in his pain, always a mensch. Christie Parker is huggably tender as the woman he eventually marries, with the prodding parental oversight of her father (Buck Schirner, who delightfully nails three major roles). Bonetti and Parker, falling in love, create the sweetest scenes you'll see here this season; when she sings him a soul-restoring pep talk, you want to burst.

Melissa Dunphy is the picture of virtue as Pericles' daughter, and David Raphaely's sudden nobility comes naturally when he's enchanted by her. They all look great in Vickie Esposito's handsome costumes.

The Festival maintains that

Pericles

has not been produced in Philadelphia in more than 150 years. Yo! It was worth the wait.