SHAKESPEARE: IN LOVE AND SONG; BRANAGH DOES THE BARD AGAIN.

Byline: Reed Johnson  Staff Writer

At first, the idea sounds like a leftover gag from some old vaudeville routine.

Straight man: Say, buddy, do you know William Shakespeare's ``Love's Labour's Lost''?

Comic: No, but hum a few bars and I'll try to sing along.

Ba-DUM-bum!

Of course, making Shakespeare's plays stand up and sing has never been an easy task. But suppose you want them to tap-dance as well?

Among the few brave souls to pull it off was Cole Porter, who transformed ``The Taming of the Shrew'' into the melodic Broadway farce ``Kiss Me Kate.'' Earlier, the trio of George Abbott, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart retrofitted ``The Comedy of Errors'' as the wisecracking 1938 stage romp, ``The Boys From Syracuse.'' Both shows later became feature films.

Now Kenneth Branagh, who first caught Hollywood's eye a dozen years ago with his lyrical adaptation of Shakespeare's ``Henry V,'' is hoping that movie audiences will pick up the tune to his unusual new treatment of the Bard's romantic comedy ``Love's Labour's Lost,'' which opens at area theaters Friday.

Aping the MGM and Warner Bros. musicals that he knew and loved as a kid, Branagh has reconceived the featherweight ``Love's Labour's'' in the style of a low-budget Busby Berkeley extravaganza, complete with top-hatted gallants and gammy girls in chic evening wear cavorting in blissful escapism.

The ditsy ensemble piece, which co-stars Branagh, Alicia Silverstone and Nathan Lane, has been updated to 1939, on the eve of World War II, and contains several period-style dance numbers set to popular standards. Among them are tunes by Irving Berlin (``Cheek to Cheek''), the Gershwins (``I've Got a Crush on You''), Porter (``I Get a Kick Out of You''), Jerome Kern, Dorothy Field and others of their effervescently romantic ilk.

Risky? You bet. Branagh's well aware he's flouting Hollywood conventional wisdom that says unless you're Disney, musicals are a high- finance version of Russian roulette.

But while the movie has a deliberately light-headed fizziness - a champagne buzz, if you will - the 39-year-old actor-director is characteristically sober and thoughtful in explaining his artistic rationale.

``There'd always been an idea to do a (Shakespeare) musical,'' says Branagh, doing his earth-toned best to blend in with the furniture at the Peninsula Beverly Hills Hotel.

`` `Love's Labour's Lost' was attractive to me because I'd enjoyed making `Much Ado About Nothing' and the effectiveness of Shakespeare's comedies has a way of relaxing people when they see Shakespeare, simply because he makes people laugh. So the possibility of a marriage between the two (Shakespeare and musicals) has been in my mind for some years now.''

Written during the early-middle of Shakespeare's career, ``Love's Labour's Lost'' is breezier and more whimsical than the Bard's mature comedies like ``Much Ado,'' which Branagh filmed in 1993 and co-starred in with then-wife Emma Thompson.

Its simple, boys-meet-girls plot concerns the King of Navarre and his three best friends, who vow to give up women for three years so as to study philosophy.

But when the Princess of France (Silverstone) and her three beautiful attendants pay a diplomatic visit to court, hormones swell, silliness ensues, and the guys happily discover that philosophy is fine until you crave more than just a platonic relationship.

Branagh, who plays one of the King's three friends, Berowne, says ``Love's Labour's'' struck him as good musical material because of its fleet-footed charm and its numerous references to dancing and song. Shakespeare, as Branagh points out, wrote music for many of his plays, often using it to heighten emotions and lift his characters into realms of surreal expressiveness.

``I think he (Shakespeare) recognized that it's part of the ritual of romantic love, that at various times people did need to do something more than just talk about it,'' says Branagh, who reckons he trimmed about 25 percent of Shakespeare's text to accommodate the show tunes.

If the Elizabethan period marked the first golden age of English-speaking theater, Hollywood and Broadway, circa 1925-1955, epitomized the golden age of the American musical.

Growing up in England and Northern Ireland, Branagh feasted his eyes and ears on the Technicolor razzle-dazzle of that imported fantasy world. In the early 1960s, when American musicals (although in steep decline) still formed the lingua franca of popular culture, Branagh would snuggle up to BBC 2 television broadcasts of American movies on gray Saturday afternoons.

``It'd be all sorts of things, gangster films, musicals,'' Branagh recalls. ``That's where I first saw, inevitably, 'The Wizard of Oz' and 'Easter Parade' and those Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland films, and (Fred) Astaire. I did think it was very magical.''

Later, while attending drama school, the classically trained Branagh acted in the Gershwin musical ``Lady Be Good,'' in which a very young Fred Astaire and his sister, Adele, had starred in the original 1924 Broadway run.

That ``uplifting'' experience, Branagh says, suggested certain parallels when he began formulating ``Love's Labour's Lost.''

``On some sort of simple level, (the two shows) shared silly plots, inconsequential plots, plots that don't really stand up to too much scrutiny,'' he observes. ``The entertainment is all in the execution, be it singing and dancing in a musical or, in Shakespeare's case, through, almost uniquely in his plays, a fantastically exuberant delight in language, with scant regard for structure and for consistency.''

Branagh says the idea of turning ``Love's Labour's'' into a musical really began to gestate a couple of years ago while he was filming Woody Allen's ``Celebrity.'' Allen's previous film had been the moony modern-day musical ``Everyone Says I Love You'' (1996), in which Allen and his all-star cast broke into spontaneous warblings of pop standards, with varying degrees of technical polish but considerable warmth and charm.

``What for me was the most successful part of a very enjoyable film, I thought, was the end section, with Woody Allen and Goldie Hawn on the banks of the Seine, and her kind of floating and him being a DJ and her looking very glamorous. I think that works absolutely the best, because it sort of sets up a world of romantic musical comedy where we feel much more comfortable about people bursting into songs.''

Originally, Branagh says, he and his production team intended to write original songs for ``Love's Labour's,'' but they ``just looked pretty silly next to Shakespeare.''

They then considered using fresher, lesser-known tunes from the massive Porter and Gershwin songbooks.

In the end, Branagh decided there was no way to improve on the elegant, economical pithiness of masterpieces like ``They Can't Take That Away From Me.''

``They pick up on something simple and banal and utterly recognizable to everyone as something which, in love, we often seize upon as a defining moment: `Oh, when he turned around and his hair caught in the breeze, that's when I fell in love.' You take that and then you construct a song around it. It's simple and profound at the same time.''

For Branagh and his fellow thespians, the film made triple demands: acting, singing and dancing. Some, like Nathan Lane, had enough musical-theater chops to have starred in Broadway shows.

Others had virtually no song or dance background, a quality that Branagh hopes actually works to the film's advantage.

``I wanted this to be very honest and very sort of heartfelt, and if rough edges emerged, for that to be an acceptable price to pay,'' he says. ``As I made clear to the actors, we obviously cannot be Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and Gene Kelly, all these people. But at the same time I don't want to parody them.''

One of the actors who lobbied hardest to be in the film, Branagh says, was Silverstone, the cast's youngest member.

``She has this great gift for light comedy,'' Branagh says. ``She has terrific vitality, an inner spark. One of those people who, when the camera goes on, suddenly everything that's inside seems to be there in their eyes. So she's always very vital. And she worked immensely hard to make it look easy.''

Silverstone's youth and beauty also underscore the movie's tone of hopeful innocence - an innocence that Hollywood hasn't seen much lately.

``For me, (the movie) is a kind of resistance to an age of such deep cynicism,'' Branagh says, gathering himself up for a waiting photographer. ``But the sort of good-hearted, open-hearted nature of it, I wanted to be sending out a bit of that energy.''

As he exits the hotel lounge, Branagh doesn't quite glide like Astaire. But there's a definite spring in his step.

CAPTION(S):

4 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color -- cover) Kenneth Branagh

Actor-director gives Shakespeare a song-and-dance treatment in 'Love's Labour's Lost'

(2 -- 3) Director Kenneth Branagh, below, felt that the varying degrees of vocal proficiency of his stars, including, left, Alessandro Nivola, Alicia Silverstone, Matthew Lillard, Carmen Ejogo, Adrian Lester, Emily Mortimer, Branagh himself and Natascha McElhone, worked in the musical's favor: ``I wanted (the movie) to be very honest and very sort of heartfelt.''

(4) At first, Kenneth Branagh wanted original songs written for ``Love's Labour's Lost'' but later realized they ``just looked pretty silly next to Shakespeare.''

Phil McCarten/Staff Photographer