Chivas Michael, Joaquina Kalukango, and Jonathan Cake in Antony and Cleopatra, via

So-called reimaginings of Shakespeare are priced at approximately 12/$0.10, and regular theater-goers have learned through hard and bitter experience to beware the word “except,” implicit or explicit, in the description of productions: “It’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, except it’s set in Riker’s Island in the 1920s”; “It’s Romeo and Juliet, except Romeo is a lesbian animal-rights activist”; “It’s Coriolanus, except it’s really about the excesses of executive compensation in Wall Street financial firms.” Et cetera. For every pleasantly surprising, imaginative take on a Shakespeare play, there are about forty that make you want to go the full out-vile-jelly on yourself. I very much liked the film version of Richard Eyre’s Richard III, the 1930s fascist aesthetic of which suits the material nicely and makes me wish I could have seen it on the stage, and likewise Julie Taymor’s fever-dream Titus—but Ms. Taymor’s by-the-numbers sex-change operation on The Tempest was beyond even the powers of Helen Mirren and Alan Cumming to redeem. And Mr. Cumming, who carried an almost-one-man version of Macbeth set in a modern mental ward, enjoys considerable powers of redemption when it comes to iffy high-concept Shakespeare adaptations.