“King Arthur” is the latest in a by-now lengthy line of Mark Morris send-ups of Baroque scores. Here, Purcell’s 1691 score is filtered through the conceit of show within a show. All this makes great sense according to the dictates of Mr. Morris’s aesthetic, since the choreographer likes to tease or entice his audience with the suggestion of participatory performance. Community song and dance are close to his heart, and here, amidst the trappings of avocational performance, he can find a logical rationale for them. “King Athur” is zany, daffy, and bawdy in the classic Morris manner. By now, Mr. Morris’s audience knows what to expect, and he knows not to disappoint them.

“King Arthur” kicks off with a semicircle of chairs arrayed in the first wing. Designer Adrianne Lobel has provided school assembly red curtains and other accoutrements of institutional décor. The dancers and solo singers are onstage — the chorus is in the pit with the orchestra — arrayed by Isaac Mizrahi in a gaudy motley of typical practice wear layered underneath multiple sartorial strata of Arthurian and Restoration-era fantasy.

In his direction and choreography, Mr. Morris is, as always, note-conscious. His cleavage to the topography of the printed score is, however, less noticeable here than his trademark literalism when it comes to setting texts to dancing. Mr. Morris’s kinetic imagery is an ongoing attempt to rhyme with the music that sometimes descends into overt banalities. When the singers mention “expire,” the dancers drop to the ground. When at the beginning of Mr. Morris’s first act, the chorus booms out tales of conquest, sacrifice, and enslavement, the dancers turn into bound legions.

Mr. Morris likes doing the circle and he’s good at it. Early in Act I, he juxtaposes single-stage-wing frieze processions with carousel formations that require a deeper expansion of the stage space. Act II opens in what looks like a strip club, complete with thumbnail-size stage, but soon opens up into a full-ensemble dance with the dancers waving veils that make them both cheerleaders and participants in a chthonic procession. Themes of fertility and abundance make all but inevitable the traditional Maypole dance, as the ultimate homage to the circle and its perpetual reinforcement of continuity, perfection, and eternity.

Throughout “King Arthur,” Mr. Morris pulls out all the stops, and he might have done himself a favor in pulling out fewer. I couldn’t help wondering what “King Arthur” might have looked like had Mr. Morris employed his considerable imagination outside of his typical channels.