New York critics called it "a gift from the gods."

Metamorphoses and its sexy, hilarious and heartbreaking tales of gods and mortals sent New York swooning when it opened there two years ago.

No one had seen anything quite like it, and director Mary Zimmerman won just about every theater award New York had to offer for her adaptation of stories from Ovid, set in and around a 30-foot pool.

It is fall's must-see ticket, at Playhouse in the Park Oct. 19-Nov. 21.

We remember Midas - greedy, right? That's just the start of it.

And Orpheus - the musician who braved the Underworld to fetch his bride back from death?

What do these characters have to do with us today? Everything.

Consider Phaeton, the half-mortal son of the Sun God who one day wheeled his father's chariot from him.

"Now there's only one thing I want," Phaeton tells us. "I mean, it's obvious, right? I say, 'Give me the keys to your car.' Immediately he starts back-pedaling, saying it's his job, no one else can do it, that up in the sky there are the bull and the lion and the scorpion who want to get me.

"And I say, 'Give me the keys to your car. I want to drive it myself across the sky. It's my turn. You promised. I want to light the world today.' "

Metamorphoses is why you go to theater. It shimmers before our eyes, its potent humanity binding our lives to the stories being told on stage, stories that are both ancient and palpably our own.

This is the night you're going to remember all year - and probably a lot longer than that.

- Jackie Demaline