[In the following review of director Liz Huddle's 2003 production of Measure for Measure at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, Baker remarks on the easygoing appeal of this conventional comic staging, but notes that the play did not attempt to resolve the problematic questions raised by Shakespeare's drama.]

Duke Vincentio thinks Vienna is becoming too licentious. So, he brings in a strict deputy to clean things up, then disappears for a while, secretly checking on his substitute to see how things are going. What follows is a dark comedy that offers an intriguing exploration of public and private ethics—Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, which opened Wednesday at the Utah Shakespearean Festival.

When the bawdy Mistress Overdone (Leslie Brott) and her procurer, Pompey (Joe Cronin), are introduced, it becomes obvious that Vienna is due for a cleanup. Unfortunately, the puritanical deputy, Angelo, carries the matter too far. When he begins enforcing old morality laws without consideration for circumstance, a young gentleman who has impregnated his fiance is sentenced to death.

Not surprisingly, Angelo's self-righteous posturing hides smothered passions. When the condemned man's virginal sister, Isabella, comes to plead her brother's case, Angelo is smitten with unholy desire. Though filled with shame and guilt, he offers Isabella a crude bargain: her virginity for her brother's life. Scott Coopwood, who plays Angelo, needs to speak the text more trippingly, but his intense portrayal brings out Angelo's repressed personality to good effect.

Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare's more problematic plays, although it is thoroughly engrossing. The playwright's solutions to the play's dilemmas can seem facile, even underhanded, to today's audiences: Isabella's chastity is preserved by a switch of sexual partners under cover of darkness and Claudio's life is preserved by switching a dead prisoner for a live one, simple as that.

Still, the play's artificial situations raise issues that continue to trouble society: How far can morality be legislated? Does preservation of principle trump preservation of life? At what point should justice step aside and allow mercy to prevail? Shakespeare didn't have all the answers, and neither do we.

Director Liz Huddle's interpretation emphasizes Measure for Measure's lighter, more comic elements. Along the way to the too-neat ending, there are many delights. Count among them a moving performance by Elisabeth Adwin as Isabella, along with a show-stealing comic turn by Michael David Edwards as a foppish aristocrat, Lucio. And Henry Woronicz gives his performance as a duke-in-friar's-clothing with canny wit. One can question this character's ethics, but never his likability.

As with the other two Shakespearean plays that debuted this week, production values for Measure for Measure are glorious—a large cast of fine actors, a set featuring elegant Italian murals (Bill Forrester), and luscious costumes rendered with Baroque flourish (Janet L. Swenson). The show's elaborate incidental music, for organ, was composed by Christine Frezza, whose vocal setting of “Sigh No More, Ladies” is sung charmingly by boy soprano Kevin Whitney.

The Utah Shakespearean Festival is not the optimal choice for those who favor hip updates of the Bard's plays or agenda-driven productions set in unexpected times and places. But for beautiful renditions of Shakespeare's works in the traditional vein, USF is the perfect place, and any of this year's offerings will deliver full measure of awe and delight.