Theater

“The Two Gentlemen of Verona”: Director Mark Rucker’s imaginative staging of Shakespeare’s flawed comedy makes Verona a milk-fed American town circa 1960 and Milan a more sophisticated city of the same era. The visual design is wittily surprising, the characters’ teenage passions are strongly felt and the text emerges with lucidity and grace. This is the third in a series of Shakespearean comedies Rucker has staged at South Coast Repertory. It’s not quite up to “The Taming of the Shrew” (1996) or “Much Ado About Nothing” (2001), yet it’s still in the 99th percentile of local Shakespearean productions.

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Ends Sunday at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. (714) 708-5555.