This ‘Much Ado’ really something

Garden Grove is back in the groove as one of the Southland’s centers for summertime theater.

Two radically different productions opened over the weekend in adjacent venues at the Village Green in downtown Garden Grove: a merrily traditional “Much Ado About Nothing” in the Festival Amphitheatre and three short, bleak Beckett plays in the smaller Gem Theatre.

“Much Ado” marks the return of producer Tom Bradac to the Festival Amphitheatre, which recently underwent a $200,000 renovation by the city. Bradac’s Grove Shakespeare Festival used the site from 1979 to 1991. Then he set up a new company, Shakespeare Orange County, at Chapman University in Orange, and his summer productions of Shakespeare moved indoors.

Shakespeare Orange County is still billed as Chapman’s “resident professional theater company,” but its productions are now under the stars, five miles west of the campus. Judging from “Much Ado,” that’s where they belong.

Accompanied by lilting guitar strains, Carl Reggiardo’s staging of Shakespeare’s comedy is an ideal match for the site and the summer night.

The production is powered by two performances that are appropriately wary of each other but remarkably audience-friendly: Donald Sage Mackay’s Benedick and Christy Yael’s Beatrice.

Mackay, known for his work with A Noise Within and the Colony, is the quick-witted soldier who’s back from a war, eager to resume his sparring matches with the equally acerbic Beatrice. With a quick smile and a ready quip, Mackay is more charming than most Benedicks. He draws in the theatergoers as co-conspirators, at one point entering the seating area to speak about the graces of women with reference to some women in the audience.

Yael doesn’t play the audience as much as Mackay does, but she is an articulate defender of her viewpoint and projects the fiery intelligence of one of those feisty attorneys in a Hepburn movie or a current TV series.

As is often the case, the laughs reach their apex with the matching eavesdropping scenes, in which first Benedick and then Beatrice surreptitiously overhear their friends’ purposeful attempts to get the two of them together. Mackay and Yael nimbly execute their respective attempts to get closer to the gossip.

Robert Pescovitz plays the villain with a grave magnetism that so excites his followers that they smile even after he literally twists their arms. The assured Michael Nehring plays his better brother.

The young lovers are in the capable hands of the dashingly handsome Joe Sanfelippo and Toi Perkins, but John Shouse looks a little too ancient as the father of the bride. Craig Wesley Brown’s malaprop-spouting Dogberry and his motley crew add the usual laughs. Joshua Snyder’s tenor makes the “Sigh, no more” solo worthy of contented sighs.

Reggiardo’s staging is set in 1593 Messina, as Shakespeare envisioned, with predictable costumes and a conventional Mediterranean look in Trevor Norton’s set.

Performances are preceded with enacted excerpts from “The Canterbury Tales,” beginning at 7:30 on the lawn outside the amphitheater.

With the exception of momentary noise from a passing motorcycle or the distant booms from the Disneyland fireworks, everything about this “Much Ado” is crystal clear and very hey-nonny-nonny, which is exactly what most patrons of alfresco Shakespeare want.

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‘Much Ado About Nothing’

Where: Festival Amphitheatre, 12740 Main St., Garden Grove

When: 8:15 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays

Ends: July 31

Price: $26

Contact: (714) 744-7016

Running Time: 2 hours, 30 minutes