Sweet and sour Commonwealth’s Much Ado About Nothing; the Publick’s Troilus and Cressida BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Much Ado About Nothing By William Shakespeare. Directed by Steven Maler. Presented by Commonwealth Shakespeare Company at the Parkman Bandstand on Boston Common through August 1. Troilus and Cressida By William Shakespeare. Directed by Steven Barkhimer. At the Publick Theatre, in repertory through September 12.

Nothing’s fair in love and war in Much Ado About Nothing and Troilus and Cressida, both of which opened this week in outdoor stagings. In the Bard’s Messina-set comedy, this year’s free Commonwealth Shakespeare Company offering on Boston Common, at least all’s well that ends well, with multiple marriages and a sprightly dance. But getting there involves lying, trickery, traps, and a whole lot of pithily scathing repartee. In Shakespeare’s startlingly modern take on the Trojan War, which is being given a rare outing at the Publick Theatre, even the conclusion is unsporting, as befits a play drenched in military, moral, and romantic cynicism, in which the only noble character is murdered in cold blood and the on-scene commentator sees nothing in the bored grappling around him but "Lechery, lechery! Still wars and lechery!"

The biggest difference between these two plays is that one basks in post-war frivolity while the other is up to its toga fastenings in near-numbing on-and-off combat. Steven Maler, the directorial force behind the annual Shakespeare parties on Boston Common, shoots the festivity of Much Ado out of a cannon, with its gaggle of soldiers returning whole from an unspecified war and marching smartly into town, all tight leather pants and cocky bonhomie, to a welcoming banner and a band playing "The Stars and Stripes Forever." Indeed, the production presents a series of pretty pageants interspersed with the sex-sparked mutual tongue lashing of Beatrice and Benedick, a cruel but rightable subplot, and the knock-about antics of local law enforcement more inept than the Iraqis’. Spurred by Jonno Roberts’s flamboyantly antic Benedick, the evening gallops along like the post-war dream we wish we were having, with the only casualties ripe if fallible hearts, courtesy of Colonel Cupid.

Much Ado, always popular, is proving particularly so this summer; the play just opened in Central Park’s Delacorte Theater in a production that stars Jimmy Smits and Kristen Johnston as the marriage avoiders made for each other. On the Common, the combatants in Shakespeare’s "merry war" are portrayed by the married duo of Roberts and Georgia Hatzis. Although her performance is less dynamic and more one-note than his, it’s poised and smart, with a soupçon of 1940s glamor and a tough glint. When, their passion for each other finally tricked out of a closet crammed with barbs and spitfire, she asks him to prove his love by killing someone, you imagine the snapping-eyed beauty means it. As Benedick, Roberts — fuming, pacing, or adopting a wee tone to declare man "a giddy thing" — is all rakish energy, with one foot in broad comedy (whether swooning with a thud or falling clear off the stage), the other in rock-star sex appeal. His Benedick is a quick-witted goofball who is also a swashbuckler, a marriage-phobe who is also a ladies’ man. (When Beatrice taunts him as "Signior Mountanto" — Mr. Thruster — she may not be referring to fencing.)

Two stories are told in Much Ado, though Maler aims in this ebullient production more for word-drunk celebration than narrowly averted melodrama. While Beatrice and Benedick are carrying on their war of clever retort, another returning soldier, Claudio, is falling hard for Beatrice’s cousin, Hero, the daughter of Messina’s governor, Leonato. Commanding officer and Prince of Aragon Don Pedro brokers the match, and the young lovers — she a tiny twit of a thing; he tall, dark, and smoldering — seem set for wedded bliss. But Don Pedro’s disaffected bastard brother, Don John, a self-declared "plain-dealing villain," engineers a ruse by which Hero is perceived to be unfaithful and denounced at the altar. The brute histrionics of this event are played down here in favor of the lighter, broader tone of the romantic comedy. (Only in Sean McGuirk’s sensitive turn as Don Pedro, who seems pronouncedly sincere in his offer of love to Beatrice, is there a note of melancholy that’s sounded again at the production’s end.)

Not everything on Boston Common is a delight. Soulful puppy Kaolin Bass fights against the callowness of Claudio, but Amelia Nickles’s kewpie Hero, requisitely petite and sporting a Guinevere wig, is annoying. And it’s not possible to wring sidesplitting comedy from the lowbrow antics of Constable Dogberry, deputy Verges, and the Watch (though the latter makes its entrance as an amusingly cheesy Italian trio). Bobbie Steinbach, a squat female Dogberry in helmet, epaulets, and red ruffled underpants, does bring the right combination of pomp and idiocy to the malapropping constable, who brandishes a riding crop she’s not afraid to use.

Scott Bradley has designed a handsome set that’s bronzy-looking and dominated by a large, round, orgasmic fountain into which someone is eventually slam-dunked. Sensuous color is everywhere, though, whether in the mauve lanterns that light up the revels or the pinks, corals, and fuchsias of the women’s fluttery, Greek-inspired costumes. The real Messina is on the northeast tip of Sicily, but here the design is all over the map, with the soldiers’ costumes melding Napoleonic with punk and an unusual band offering Chianti-dripping accordion, Spanish guitar, trilling mandolin, even tuba and trombone in service of J Hagenbuckle’s effective score, which includes a catchy setting of "Sigh no more, ladies" that gets a showboating delivery from Robert Doris’s crooner Balthasar. Given the music’s intermittent hints of Mediterranean, flamenco, and Preservation Hall, I’m not sure just where we are. But it’s a great place to lay down a blanket and watch the Bard beat hell out of The Bachelor.

That such isn’t true of the teetering Troy and the years-long Greek campout of Troilus and Cressida is hardly the fault of the gutsy Publick Theatre, which is to be commended for taking on a timely, difficult play that ricochets between eloquence and nastiness. Encumbered by some inexperienced and miscast actors, the troupe doesn’t really pull it off. But director Steven Barkhimer, better known as an actor and a musician, has made judicious cuts in the text (and moved Pandarus’s famous final speech bequeathing us his diseases), created some interesting stage pictures, and brought clarity to the play’s two, interwoven stories: one, involving Iliad biggies Agamemnon, Ulysses, Achilles, and Hector, taken from Homer; the other, about the young Trojan prince whose inamorata turns strumpet, borrowed from Chaucer.

As the play opens, the Trojan War has been going on for seven years. Everyone acknowledges that the conflict, fought over what critic Jan Kott terms "a cuckold and a hussy," is pointless. But on it goes, since honor will not give in to reason. In Troy, young Troilus negotiates with Pandarus to bring him to the bed of the pimp’s niece, Cressida, whose father has joined the Greeks. In the Greek camp, the generals debate policy and try to rouse their fiercest warrior, Achilles, from a lazy tent-side idyll with his companion Patroclus. The bait is beefy shit-for-brains Ajax, whom they make their standard bearer in a one-on-one fight with Trojan hero Hector. When Achilles sees Ajax getting all the attention, it’s hoped, he’ll realize that, in the words of Ulysses, "Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back/Wherein he puts alms for oblivion." In other words, live on yesterday’s laurels and you’ll soon be yesterday’s news.

No sooner has Troilus bedded the equally passionate and petulant Cressida than she must join her father in the Greek camp, part of a prisoner exchange. Alas, her faith, much demanded and much pledged, proves less reliable than his. As Ulysses observes of the young lady, "She will sing any man at first sight." In this regard, the play is a sort of anti–Romeo and Juliet, with the scurvy Greek Thersites standing in for the Prince of Verona, replacing doleful benediction with misanthropic derision.

The Publick production boasts some effective combat fought with shields, big sticks, and bare hands. It also removes all ambiguity from the connection of Achilles and Patroclus, whom Thersites calls not "Achilles’ brooch," as in the text, but "Achilles’ bitch." Barkhimer’s Ulysses has some weight, though he’s more perky than august. And Nathaniel McIntyre presents a sympathetic, well-spoken Hector. But William Gardiner is a jollier than slimy Pandarus, and Gerard Slattery, young, rotund, and mixing whine with bombast, conveys none of Thersites’s scurrilousness. As the R&J turned broken-hearted chump and "revolted fair," Kawa Ada proves capable of tenderness and anguish but overacts, and Angie Jepson, as the tart teen betrayed by sexual awakening, barely flickers. But this is tough terrain; she might shine brighter in Messina.