Stage : The Bard’s ‘Much Ado’ Travels Well to 1939 Fascist Italy

It’s 1939. The Fascists hold Italy in an iron grip, and war is raging to the east and west. Italian Jews are picked up and shipped off to concentration camps, homosexuals summarily deported to Africa. Il Duce struts on his balcony and grunts at the world. But life goes on, as it does during any war, anywhere.

On the home front, everyone tries to forget the sound of the bombs and the cloud of approaching doom. So it is in Messina in July of 1939. The guns are far away and romance helps blot out the inevitable. So it is in the Grove Shakespeare Festival’s memorable production of “Much Ado About Nothing.”

Moving Shakespeare out of his period is a favorite theater game that frequently amuses directors but often leaves audiences in a fog. Not so in director Jules Aaron’s tantalizing choice of time and place for his lively, witty and often comic staging. Think of Ronald Reagan chasing Ann Sheridan in the home-front romantic comedies produced by Hollywood during World War II, while our boys were being shot down over Germany and ambushed on Pacific isles.

Beatrice bickering with Benedick, and Claudio mooning over Hero while their boys are pushing the Fascist cause have a startlingly familiar look and make a powerful point about human nature, social values and, yes, patriotism.

These people deceive themselves and each other. The games they play ignore any greater issues, just as their Renaissance prototypes did.

What fools these mortals be. But certainly they’re charming fools, just as Shakespeare meant them, and don’t be misguided. Shakespeare’s Don Pedro was Phillip II of Spain, and his bastard brother Don John was Phillip’s bastard brother Don Juan. There was heavy intent behind the Bard’s merrymaking, just as there is behind Aaron’s.

The production that frames their intent has its own charms, beginning with the stylish old Italian street of D. Martyn Bookwalter’s evocative set, with its broad flagstones, arches and balconies, and mannequins in costume standing about like Italian war plant workers dressed up and frozen in their revels at a Saturday night on the piazza. David Palmer’s lighting could be a little more intricate but does have its moments and does give the sense of Mediterranean air. Lyndall L. Otto’s costumes are of the period and the personality of the wearer.

The air and personality of the production are defined pointedly by another fine original musical score by Chuck Estes, so Italian it smiles, particularly in his modern setting of the ballad “Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more/Men were deceivers ever.” He makes it sound like a 1939 pop song.

Although some of the minor supporting actors get a little rambunctious, the performances are across the board marked by that most difficult of tricks, making the words sound natural while still allowing the poetry to shine through. This is the special delight of Elizabeth Norment as Beatrice and David Drummond as Benedick. Their lightness and honesty is the stuff of high comedy. They play together as though they’ve been doing it for years, and they’re a delight to watch.

Richard Soto and Hisa Takakuwa are a reticent Claudio and Hero, but their fires may burn stronger with playing, and Gary Armagnac’s Don Pedro is as vigorous and full as that thankless role can be. Harry Woolf’s Leonato is a warm Italian civil servant.

A funny, sly social comment is made with another thankless role, the rapacious Don John, by having Carl Reggiardo first appear with a hair net beneath his Fascist cap, and then allowing him tender freedoms with Conrade (Joe Foster as a fascist boy scout). Don John is an officer and a nobleman and hasn’t been shipped off to Africa--at least not yet.

When a “concept” production of Shakespeare works, it’s a rare pleasure. Like the Grove’s 1988 “Star Wars” treatment of “Comedy of Errors,” this “Much Ado About Nothing” hits just the right notes. It’s in the right time and right place to make its inner meaning clear in the modern world.

At the Festival Amphitheatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Performances at 8:30 p.m., Thursdays through Sundays. Through July 14. Tickets: $16 to $19. Information: (714) 636-7213.