Pants on Fire's Metamorphoses

In the English troupe Pants on Fire's frequently delightful take on Metamorphoses, director Peter Bramley reinterprets Ovid's philosophical chuckle in the face of suffering as the product of a stiff upper lip. We find ourselves in Blitz-era London, where a young cast gamely changes Ovid’s greatest hits into tart ’40s comic sketches. But a late-in-the-day attempt at moralizing chases away the show’s early sense of effortlessness, and we are left cherishing individual performances rather than the whole.—Helen Shaw