Forget about the budget-bloating helicopter that roared in at a crucial moment in Miss Saigon. In Mark Lamos' extravagant production of William Shakespeare's Cymbeline, now at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre, an even more impressive and unexpected flying object arrives to offer one of the characters a thrilling climactic reprieve. As an object to woo the senses, it's only one of a series of awesome elements that distinguish this uneven but ultimately quite worthwhile go at the Bard's late-period romance, set in a kingdom in a faraway world that's meant to be Britain.


With Cymbeline, Shakespeare (or whoever wrote it) cut swaths of material from previous works as disparate as [...]