SHAKESPEARE'S BIG SHOW; SIR PETER AND L.A. COMPANY DEBUT `MIDSUMMER,' `MEASURE'.

Byline: Reed Johnson Theater Critic

Youthful lust and hormonally driven hypocrisy are the themes the Ahmanson Theatre is using to promote its double scoop of Shakespeare this summer.

And, as Hollywood lately has shown, sex can indeed be a useful marketing tool when you're trying to make iambic pentameter palatable to a mass audience.

When the Ahmanson hired Sir Peter Hall to stage its Bardian twin bill, the esteemed British director vowed to assemble a company of actors who could deliver Shakespeare with American-style passion plus an Anglican flair for making Elizabethan verse intelligible to modern ears.

Hall has responded with a split decision: a stark and stirring ``Measure for Measure,'' and a high-strung, stylistically fuzzy ``A Midsummer Night's Dream.'' Although his company does, as Hall promised, speak Shakespeare's verse in a uniform style, they do so with widely varying degrees of ease.

Hot-blooded emotion is allowed to run its course in both productions - or, in the case of ``Dream,'' to overflow its banks. Yet finally, it's graybeards like Brian Murray and David Dukes, veterans of many dues-paying years of stage service, who keep Hall's best-laid plans on track.

Murray delivers a first-rate performance as the wily Duke of ``Measure,'' the benevolent dictator who, during a leave of absence from Vienna, entrusts his high-minded deputy Angelo (Richard Thomas) to mete out moral justice - with chilling results. Murray also appears, less commandingly, in a comic role as Bottom the bewitched weaver of ``Midsummer.''

Dukes, another experienced trans-Atlantic performer and a longtime member of L.A.'s Matrix Theatre Company, etches a superb, complex portrait as the Duke's devil-may-care antagonist Lucio. He also turns up as an understatedly regal Theseus in ``Dream.'' But both these fine actors, like the company as a whole, do their best work in the morally murky ``Measure.''

Shrewdly cognizant of recent events in the Oval Office and the debates in Congress, Hall and designer John Gunter have set ``Measure'' in a period that's both classical and abstracted, a conflation of imperial mid-19th century Vienna and the infant U.S. republic of roughly the same era. A glowing, miniaturized Capitol building hovers at the rear of the stage, symbolizing the tensions inherent in any political system pitched between order and liberty, duty and pleasure.

Hall makes those contrasts deliciously theatrical, using the opening scene to emphasize the aging Duke's almost petrified authority as he turns over temporary command to his ardent young protege, Angelo.

Boyish and almost painfully earnest in his ethical exactitude, Thomas' Angelo suggests a baby-faced House Judiciary Committee chairman. Licking his lips and nervously gnawing his index finger, he is caught in a self-constructed web of self-righteousness when Claudio's chaste sister Isabella (Anna Gunn) arrives from a nunnery to plead for her brother's life and instead arouses Angelo's carnal desire.

Thomas smoothly engages Angelo's tortured duplicity, making him sympathetic even at his most sadistic. Unfortunately, Gunn's stiffly imperious Isabella rarely takes the wraps off the parallel inner conflicts that make her such a tempting foil for Angelo.

Dukes cuts a terrifically droll and depraved figure as the impertinent Lucio, a Mephistophelean fop defiantly wagging a walking stick that looks as if it might turn into a snake at any moment.

But the production ultimately belongs to Murray. As the Duke who must abandon his kingdom in order to save it, he seems to shed years before our eyes, metamorphosing from a pompous, prematurely gray ruler into a wise, robust law-giver. There's other fine work in this ``Measure,'' notably from George Dzundza's delightfully degenerate Pompey and Charles Janasz as the humane Provost.

In the Shakespearean canon, ``Midsummer'' may be the closest thing going to a can't-miss crowd-pleaser. Judging by the roars of approval, it didn't miss with Sunday's opening-night Ahmanson crowd, either.

To my mind, however, this production lacks poetic beauty and dynamic subtlety. Rising quickly to a shrill pitch, where it hovers for most of the next 2-1/2 hours, it's more frenzied than sensual, more fussy than voluptuous.

Of the four young moonstruck paramours, the distaff duo of Hermia (Jennifer Dundas Lowe, a compacted bundle of energy) and Helena (a wistful, poignant Kathryn Meisle) come off better-spoken and more complicated than their beaus (Linklater and Mark Deakins), which is partly the way Shakespeare wrote them.

Of the fairies, Kelly McGillis' quivery Titania seems insufficiently magisterial, while Peter Francis James' harsh, sneering Oberon carries the added burden of a beehived hairdo and glittery duds that make him look like Little Richard doing ``Cats.''

Once Shakespeare's nigh-infallible machinery gets cranking, the production picks up energy, but much of that energy gets spent in ways that don't always illuminate the text. Richard Thomas' Puck is especially distracting, his words often lost amid gleeful squeals of other-worldly androgyny and hip-wiggling paroxysms of mischief. Even the Mechanicals' performance feels slightly perfunctory.

Putting together a classical theater company from scratch, in a matter of months, is no job for the faint-hearted. Sir Peter and friends are about halfway there, which means L.A. is about halfway to what could be the start of a splendid summer tradition.

The facts

What: ``Measure for Measure'' and ``A Midsummer Night's Dream.''

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown Los Angeles.

When: In repertory through Aug. 1.

Tickets: $15 to $52.50. Call [phone] for performance dates and times and to charge by phone.

Our rating: ``Measure'' - three and one half (with sequences of partial nudity); ``Dream'' - two stars

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PHOTO (1-2) Anna Gunn is Isabella and Richard Thomas is Angelo in ``Measure for Measure,'' at left. Kelly McGillis is Titania and Brian Murray is Bottom in ``A Midsummer Night's Dream,'' above, at the Ahmanson Theatre.