Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival

Somehow Shakespeare became synonymous with summer, probably because of the growth nationally of Shakespeare festivals in off-season months. Looking to get your fix of the Bard? It's not hard to find "a stage where every man must play a part. " The Comedy of Errors. Two sets of identical twins are separated at birth - wow, that guy took risks with plot credibility. This is one of his earliest plays, going on Wednesday through July 17 at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival at DeSales University, near Allentown.

Theater Art Tony-winning comedy about a painting that ignites fierce debate. Judd Hirsch stars. Closes 7/31. Surflight Theatre, Beach & Engleside Ave., Harvey Cedars, NJ; 609-492-9477. $31-$49. Cape May Stage: The Understudy A Hollywood action star gets a big role in a new Broadway play, but clashes with his understudy. Closes 7/30. Robert Shackleton Playhouse, Bank & Lafayette Sts., Cape May; Box Office: 609-884-1341. $35-$50; $30-$50 seniors; $12.50-$50 students. Commonwealth Classic Theatre Company: The Tragedy of King Richard III A war hero & respected community member proves ruthless.

Each time a servant bearing a platter laden with food opens the door to the banquet hall in Macbeth, the jovial noise of good fellowship is heard and a shaft of light lances through the gloom outside to catch two figures. Macbeth tries to man himself to the unthinkable deed of killing Duncan, his king. His hand will hold the dagger, but the steel will to use it and make the crucial leap from desire to deed comes from his wife. It's an illuminating moment in the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival's production of Macbeth in which the dynamics of the playing and the staging are in accord.

At its heart, The Comedy of Errors is a ridiculous play with a preposterous premise. Scholars will point out its classical roots - two works by Plautus, conjoined - or its early window onto the playwright's later inquiries into identity and power. But this Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival production, directed at the fest for the second time by Russell Treyz (the first was in 1997), aims straight for the groundlings. It's up to festival favorite Carl Wallnau as Syracusan merchant Egeon to set the story's tone, and Treyz makes sure it is loud and clear by turning Egeon into a prop comic.

On these particular midsummer nights, dreams abound. You have to wonder whether Shakespeare, in the back of his mind, knew when he wrote his romp in the forest that it would become prime material for summer- night stages, indoors and out. Yes or no, A Midsummer Night's Dream has become just that, a captivating way to pass a summer night with the Bard's woodland sprites and confused mortal creatures - lots of laughs with love at the core....

"Every time we make a projection, we reach it or exceed it. " If that statement by the Rev. Gerard J. Schubert regarding the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival has the ring of a slight boast, Father Schubert can be forgiven for mildly indulging the sin of pride. The festival he started at Allentown College - which will open its fourth season tomorrow night with a production of Hamlet - has been solidly successful. Most of the festival productions have been praised by critics, and the festival's popularity and financial stability can be measured by the number of theatergoers it has attracted to the performing arts center of the rural campus of the Catholic college six miles north of Quakertown.

In the Shakespeare canon, there are works that, for differing reasons, are designated as problem plays. And then, of course, there is The Merchant of Venice, which these days ranks as the problem play. In a period when bombs are detonated in the name of religious extremism, a plea for can't-we-all-get-along compassion may seem timely. But this one comes on a bilious stream of anti-Semitism poured on Shylock, making the familiar difficulties of staging The Merchant of Venice for a contemporary audience especially intractable.

Back in the so-called Golden Age of television, even Sid Caesar used to do Shakespeare. Not the real thing, of course, but burlesque Shakespeare that appropriated one or another of the Bard's plays as a launching pad before spinning crazily out of control. Come to think of it, I seem to recall Carol Burnett and her repertory troupe doing likewise. And then there was Milton Berle, whose catalog of drag impersonations surely included Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, and who knows which other Shakespearean heroines.

"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together," observes one of the two lords who function as both narrators and chorus in All's Well That Ends Well. The same might be said of the play itself, not to mention the production of it on view through July 5 at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival. It's a nasty business, this play. On one hand you have Helena, the doctor's daughter determined to marry a man who doesn't want her. By curing the King of France of a mysterious malady, she contrives to have her heartthrob promised to her in gratitude.

Theater Broadway on Main A cast of Upper Darby High School alumni perform hits from Broadway shows. Closes 8/6. Act II Playhouse, 56 E. Butler Ave., Ambler. $20; $15 students and seniors. Cape May Stage: Steel Magnolias Six women share gossip & cope with life's ups & downs at a small-town hair salon. Closes 9/10. Robert Shackleton Playhouse, Bank & Lafayette Sts., Cape May; Box Office: 609-884-1341. $35-$50; $30-$50 seniors; $12.50-$50 students. iChoose2live: Popular Drama about what some people are willing to pay to achieve popularity.

CENTER VALLEY, Pa. - Nobody had a makeup artist in the Elizabethan theater, or a lighting designer, choreographer, or even a director. Or a publicist - although Patrick Mulcahy, the head of the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, has been doing a pretty good job spiriting audiences to the production of The Two Noble Kinsmen , a seldom-produced Shakespeare-John Fletcher collaboration the festival is staging as if it had just been written....

At its heart, The Comedy of Errors is a ridiculous play with a preposterous premise. Scholars will point out its classical roots - two works by Plautus, conjoined - or its early window onto the playwright's later inquiries into identity and power. But this Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival production, directed at the fest for the second time by Russell Treyz (the first was in 1997), aims straight for the groundlings. It's up to festival favorite Carl Wallnau as Syracusan merchant Egeon to set the story's tone, and Treyz makes sure it is loud and clear by turning Egeon into a prop comic.

Somehow Shakespeare became synonymous with summer, probably because of the growth nationally of Shakespeare festivals in off-season months. Looking to get your fix of the Bard? It's not hard to find "a stage where every man must play a part. " The Comedy of Errors. Two sets of identical twins are separated at birth - wow, that guy took risks with plot credibility. This is one of his earliest plays, going on Wednesday through July 17 at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival at DeSales University, near Allentown.

  It used to be, in these parts, when you wanted to go to the theater during the summer you had mostly the following professional choices: Shakespeare. Shakespeare. More Shakespeare. But things have changed: The Bard nowadays is one of the region's most-produced playwrights all year round - and, with the explosion of the local theater scene, the hot months are offering a much more lavish buffet. Your options extend in all directions and even down to Cape May, where Shore-bound Philadelphians can enjoy shows at two longtime professional stages.

He is easily this season's most produced playwright - 16 productions on 14 professional stages throughout the Philadelphia region. At the estimable Arden Theatre in Old City, his swept-away lovers ended in a tragic tableau of death. The younger Curio Theatre rolled out his case of mistaken identities against the backdrop of an enormous pipe organ inside a church. This week, the new Temple Repertory Theater births itself with his look at ruthless justice in old Vienna, and later this month in Clark Park in West Philly his giddy midsummer lovers will romp through the night.