[In the following review, Weber sees the Aquila Theater Company's 2002 production of The Comedy of Errors as flawed not in its individual performances, but in the undisciplined directorial decisions of Robert Richmond.]

The Aquila Theater Company, an 11-year-old part-American, part-British troupe devoted to reimagining classic plays, is inclined to exuberant stagecraft. In its new production of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, no moment is deemed complete without a bit of fizzy stage business by the actors or a madcap tweak by the director, Robert Richmond. It's the kind of high-energy effort that encourages the audience to hoot and holler and overlook the fact that the rapid-fire stage antics are only intermittently inspired. The show sets the bar of invention high and grows ever more frantic in trying to leap over it.

One of the Aquila's great strengths is space management. And at the East 13th Street Theater (better known as the home of the Classic Stage Company), where the show opened last night, the small stage, with a high ceiling and the audience on three sides, is a perfect fit. In Mr. Richmond's adaptation, the cast has been streamlined to an ensemble of seven. (Each of the play's sets of twins is played by a single actor, despite what the not terribly amusing program would have you believe.) And the production makes elegant use of the vertical space in its design. Mr. Richmond, the Aquila's associate artistic director, and Peter Meineck, the company's producing artistic director, share the credit.

The set is bright with jewel tones, and its main feature is a trio of tall, cleverly constructed collapsible tents. In fact, the production makes an effort to be an exotic circus. It includes belly-dancing, costumery of a vaguely Mediterranean ilk (some excellent fezzes!) and entertaining, archly wrought music by Anthony Cochrane that uses elements of Italian tarantella, folk themes that emanate from Greece, Russia and the Middle East, and the piping good cheer of a calliope.

All of this is appropriate and even fresh in its application to Shakespeare's lively farce about two sets of separated twins (improbably, each pair sharing a name, and each Dromio the servant of an Antipholus). The menagerie also includes two sisters, not to mention a courtesan, a witch doctor, a jeweler and a man under a death sentence (Egeon, the father of the Antipholuses—er, Antipholi?), whose long-lost wife has become an abbess. Indeed, the plot is perhaps Shakespeare's most openly screwy, which is perhaps the best argument for a calculated reserve in staging but is more often perceived as license for the unbinding of directorial giddiness.

Such is apparently the case here. After a promising start, in which the births of the four boys, the indenture of the two Dromios and the storm at sea that separates the various parties is drolly mimed by actors as human marionettes, Mr. Richmond's comic choreography is frenetic but only sporadically engaging. The jokery never really gives the sense that it is attached to a vision of the play, or even that it emanates from the play. Instead you get the idea that Mr. Richmond is using Shakespeare's play merely as a clothesline to air a motley store of ideas.

There are, to be sure, some very well-conceived and very funny set pieces. In one, a three-man negotiation over a necklace becomes a kind of dance with ritual hand signals. In another, a rare instance of a sex joke with some original flair, two modestly endowed women show their insecurity in the presence of a big-breasted courtesan. But increasingly as the play proceeds, a sense of desperation to keep the slapstick pace from flagging sets in, and Mr. Richmond relies more and more on hackneyed ideas. The number of times an actor is startled into a scream can't be counted on two hands.

A clue to what goes awry here are two excellent scenes before intermission. In one, Antipholus of Syracuse (Mark Saturno) woos Luciana (Mira Kingsley), who thinks he is Antipholus of Ephesus, her sister's husband. It's a lovely comic scene because it is underplayed. Mr. Saturno, whose comic persona for Antipholus S. is conventionally nerdy and for Antipholus E. conventionally loutish, is far better as a sincere Shakespearean than a lunatic one; his affinity for pentameter is never more evident than in this scene. And Ms. Kingsley, in a yellow dress and saddle shoes, is delectable here, swooning with pigeon-toed grace.

She is also good in the subsequent scene when she and her sister Adriana discuss the mystery of Antipholus E.'s apparent betrayal. Both Ms. Kingsley and Lisa Carter, who plays Adriana, show what can happen when actors act and are not merely being directed for comic effect.

By this time, Ms. Carter has already exhibited an ease with broad humor; her savage attack on Dromio of Ephesus (Louis Butelli, whose double dose of rubbery clowning wears out its welcome) seems amusingly natural. (She takes a Three Stooges approach to his genitals.) But later, with Mr. Richmond straining for laughs, neither woman can avoid visiting the Laverne-and-Shirley school of comedy. You cringe, after such a vivid start, to see Shakespeare end up in sitcom land.