Direct from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s intimate Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon comes the Bard’s late romance Pericles, Prince of Tyre, directed to critical hosannas by Tamara Harvey in her premiere season as the troupe’s co-artistic director (a title she shares with Daniel Evans). In a pamphlet dated 1592, the actor Richard Greene dissed the new playwright from Stratford as an “upstart crow, beautified with our feathers,” which is to say a no-talent plagiarist with a lot of nerve. In the same rant, Greene had some preemptive snark for Pericles. “A moldy tale,” he called the story—a decade and a half before Shakespeare turned it into a play. It’s true that the action, set in antiquity, feels shopworn, with its Prince Charming of a hero landing in one cauldron after another of very hot water. But with an actor of naïve grace, the narrative builds to a reunion as disarming as that of The Winter’s Tale and arguably more emotional than that of The Tempest. Alfred Enoch, who played Pericles in Stratford, possesses the music, the radiance, and the complementary shadows the part requires. In Chicago, Zach Wyatt takes over. Given the bottomless London talent pool, we’re trusting him to deliver in his own key no less luminous a performance. —Matthew Gurewitsch