The pairing is irresistible: Alan Cumming, who honed his ambisexual, Pied Piper stage persona through works such as “Cabaret” and “Design for Living,” taking on the role of Dionysus, the pansexual god of wine and revelry. Dionysus is also commonly known as Bacchus, and the National Theatre of Scotland’s uneven Lincoln Center Festival production of “The Bacchae” has added another pseudonym, one that the god himself gleefully announces — “the Scream.” In harnessing Mr. Cumming’s impish fervor to Euripides’s late-career tragedy, director John Tiffany has cobbled together a bit of a scream himself, complete with racy theatrics and a half-dozen sprightly R&B songs — performed, as it happens, by a fabulously gowned nonet of black women.

Mr. Tiffany, who coached the National Theatre of Scotland into breathtaking feats of precision and multimedia trickery with the Iraq war drama “Black Watch” (due back at St. Ann’s Warehouse in October after last year’s unforgettable visit), shows a similar confidence in the play’s earlier passages, conveying Dionysus’s allure with infectious delight. But this frothy, even campy approach has a suspiciously lulling effect, and when the action segues inevitably into retribution and intra-erfamilial murder, the imbalance gives Euripides’s stabbing drama a lopsided feel. The preceding good times feel less like a respite and more like a miscalculation.

For much of the evening, Mr. Cumming, clad in a gold lamé kilt and precious little else, offers the sort of scandalous release that entices the women and enrages the law-and-order types, particularly the Theban king Pentheus (the superb Cal MacAninch), who refuses to acknowledge Dionysus and pays dearly for his intransigence. “Now Greece must know and kneel to me,” Dionysus announces upon arriving in Thebes, an open challenge to the Pentheuses of the world. (The Scottish playwright David Grieg has tailored his chatty, fleet-footed adaptation from a literal translation by Ian Ruffell.)

This insistence is something of a misreading. The idea of “worship” in terms of Greek gods meant something very different from our modern-day concept of reverence; with the exception of warlike Ares, whom mortals and immortals alike were free to despise, all that the gods required in the broadest sense was that mortals respect them and acknowledge them as part of the natural order. This impulse to be legitimized, to be seen, would have a particularly strong pull for Dionysus, whose heavenly parentage was in question. (His mother, a Theban mortal named Semele, was first impregnated by Zeus and then immolated after his jealous wife, Hera, found out.)

Mr. Tiffany supplies his glammed-out demigod with a smattering of tricks to gain the world’s respect, including a (literally) cheeky entrance from the rafters — a visual that gets Mr. Cumming’s seemingly obligatory flash of nudity out of the way nice and early — and a magical spray of flowers that descend onto Semele’s grave. This last effect is notable in that it plays up the limitations of Miriam Buether’s austere set, a pair of curving walls that force several tentative, protracted entrances and exits. Euripides wrote “The Bacchae” shortly after leaving Athens and moving to the mountainous frontier territory of Macedon; after decades spent in the fractious city, the natural world, both nurturing and savage, seems to have tantalized but also unnerved him. This ambivalence toward nature — and, by extension, toward the ungovernable nature of man — is sadly missing in this production’s aesthetic, which is in part why Dionysus’s act of reverence is so affecting.

Ms. Buether has more luck with her costume design, notably a gorgeous green gown for the ripe scene in which Dionysus tricks Pentheus into dressing as a woman for a fateful reconnaissance mission. This stunning number is rivaled by the nine scarlet gowns for the Bacchae, with their hauteur and second-nature sensuality. Sadly, however, a lack of specificity pervades Mr. Tiffany’s conception of the Bacchae themselves. When the women aren’t launching into one of Tim Sutton’s gospel-inflected R&B numbers, they toggle between hovering wantonly and hovering ominously on the periphery, and Mr. Cumming’s few unconvincing moments come during his interactions with them. It doesn’t help that a handful of the nine women are considerably more proficient than the others, particularly during the vocal sequences, and these shortcomings become more apparent as a few of them don overcoats to play supporting male roles. (Strong concluding work by Paola Dionisotti, as Pentheus’s mother and unwitting assailant, only serves to spotlight the disparity further.)

Still, the concept of the Dionysian escapades as a glam-rock-meets-R&B love-in gone sour proves remarkably pungent for a large chunk of “The Bacchae.” If Mr. Tiffany and his puckish leading man never quite follow through on the final lurch into tragedy, the attempt is an intriguing one. Turning a Greek tragedy into a delicious romp and then back again proves to be a feat that not even a god in gold lamé can muster.

Until July 13 (60th Street and Broadway, 212-721-6500).