An all-male cast in a play about repressed and perverted lust? Don't assume for a minute that this production of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure is one of those High Concept gimmicky revisitings of a famous text where a director gets some cockamamie idea of Relevance (the Nazi Macbeth, the Latin American Julius Caesar, etc. etc.). This is the Globe Theatre on a U.S. tour, stopping in lucky Philadelphia for only six performances. I saw this thrilling production in London last summer, and my advice in brief is: Don't miss it.

The cast is all-male because this is an "original practice" production, performed as it would have been in the Renaissance. Women were not permitted to appear onstage (see Tom Stoppard's film Shakespeare in Love for more on this). And original practice extends to everything: The costumes (the designer is called Master of Clothing, Properties and Hangings) are made authentically—no zippers, no Velcro. These actors discover how people then must have moved by wearing their clothes. The Globe Theatre's mission is Shakespeare unplugged—literally. At the roofless Globe in London, plays are performed in natural light.

On the phone from London, the director, or Master of Play, John Dove, told me that in order to perform indoors and still maintain original practice, they have replicated the setting in which the play would have been performed in 1604: chandeliers overhead, a wooden screen behind the actors (a copy from one at Oxford) and the sense of the splendor and beauty of Renaissance venues. The actors change costume onstage and there are no scenery changes. The gentle music is performed on authentic Elizabethan instruments, and the full-company jig that traditionally concludes a Globe show is both authentic and delightful.

Measure for Measure is an intriguing and tricky play about sexuality and power. Not exactly a comedy, not exactly a tragedy, it begins with the Duke's realization that he has abused his power by not using it, letting his city become a moral free-for-all. To remedy his neglect ("the law hath not been dead, though it hath slept"), the Duke deputizes Angelo, young and famously moral ("A man whose blood/ Is very snow-broth"), to whip the city into shape. The Duke is supposedly out of town, but secretly spies on the proceedings.

As his first act in high office, Angelo arrests Claudio for fornication because his fiancee is pregnant, and to make him an example of the new regime of stern morality, sentences him to death. Lucio, a smarmy busybody, urges Claudio's sister, Isabella, to save her brother by pleading with Angelo to relent. Isabella is a novitiate nun, with a purity obsession to rival Angelo's, and that is exactly why he finds her so attractive. He offers her a deal: your virginity for your brother. No deal: Miss Clean tells Mr. Abstinence that her chastity is more valuable than her brother's life. They are, ironically, the perfect couple ("O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,/ With saints dost bait thy hook!").

Starring the superb Mark Rylance (who has just stepped down as the Globe's artistic director) as the Duke, this is a surprisingly sunny, frequently funny production. In London, Isabella was played by a woman; now, original practice is extended to have Edward Hogg play Isabella. John Dove commented that in the early 17th century boys would have been playing the women, but that turned out to be impossible to organize. Young male actors are a "step nearer" original practice, and although we quickly forget we're watching a man, there are, Dove notes, "subtle and deep differences with the gender swap."

Dove also talked about the chronology of the play's action, all of which takes place in merely 25 hours. None of the characters' lives has prepared them for what the plot requires them suddenly to do, and so there is "bewilderment behind it." "You get the greatest humanity out of situations where people have no time to prepare themselves," he says.

Shakespeare always seems to speak to the contemporary condition, and Measure for Measure's contemporary relevance jumps out of the 400-year-old script. Dove says that as long as they tell the story, the relevance will take care of itself; the play's issues of trust and leadership, religion, lying, hope—all strike each member of the audience differently.

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre was built by the passion and imagination of an American, Sam Wanamaker, in 1949; it is on the south bank of the London's Thames where Shakespeare's original Globe had stood. It is a wonderful and beautiful place making wonderful and beautiful theater. And for a brief moment, that beautiful theater comes to Philadelphia.

Measure for Measure, Nov. 30-Dec. 4, $30-$55, Zellerbach Theatre, Annenberg Center, 3680 Walnut St., 215-898-3900, www.pennpresents.org.