Something to Sing About

By RICHARD CORLISS

So often these days, theater is a laborious imitation of things that are easily done better elsewhere. Directors try for the intimacy of a movie close- up or the narrative voice of fiction or the pachydermal pizzazz of theme- park extravaganzas, and you think, Why did they bother? But when theater works on its own primal terms -- with a bare stage, a few actors in simple dress and a brilliant conception that breathes life into an old property -- it's the freshest, liveliest art around.

The production of Shakespeare's As You Like It by the British Cheek by Jowl troupe, which returns this week to the Brooklyn Academy of Music after a triumphant visit in October, is one such theatrical epiphany. It does more than revive the play; it revives one's faith in the theater as a place to weave magic.

Director Declan Donnellan has a gimmick: all the characters are played by men, as in Shakespeare's day. Designer Nick Ormerod has built a pristine set -- white walls, with green streamers for the Forest of Arden. In themselves, these elements are neither radical nor necessarily helpful; every English public school has a tradition of same-sex actors, and every penny-pinching little theater company leaves the scenery and props to the audience's imagination. But here the ideas seem like masterstrokes. They strip away the academic barnacles that too often make an evening of Shakespeare feel like a final exam in Esperanto, and they allow the playgoer to focus on the emotional gaiety and bewilderment at the heart of the text. What could have been minimalist camp -- oh, Lord, men in pearls and blond wigs! -- becomes a sweet meditation on mistaken sexual appetites and identity.

The main roles are imbued with gravity and grace. Adrian Lester, a willowy black Rosalind, has the gift of breathless apprehension, ever ready to burst into tears at the folly and wonder of men. Scott Handy is Orlando, properly perplexed at the vision of a man (Lester) playing a woman (Rosalind), who for the sake of a jest is playing a man. Simon Coates is deliciously censorious as Rosalind's companion, Celia, a young lady well bred in exasperation; some day she may grow up to be Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell.

The attendant shepherds and fops have a whirly, burly charm, and the bucolic maids (notably William Cates' Phebe) suggest Benny Hill on his very best night. But even these performances are never mired in the wink-wink-nudge- nudge of condescension to either Shakespeare or the audience. As Donnellan and Ormerod proved in their version of Angels in America at the National Theatre, no play is so weighted down by metaphor or message that it cannot be made to sing and soar.

Especially sing. The second half of As You Like It is buoyed by Paddy Cunneen's lovely settings for Shakespeare's rollicking rhymes. Well, if men can be women, why can't words become songs? Suddenly, all the world's a musical stage. And this glorious production makes the stage like nothing else in the world.