This play is hard.  If Beatrice and Benedick take over, the plot gets lost.  If they don't, its grim goings-on mkae the work a comedy only by definition:  it ends in marriage.

First Folio Shakespeare Festival gets the balance right by combining a good concept with superior acting.  Director Alison C. Vesely sets the play in the American Southwest after the Civil War, a surprising yet illuminating choice.  The prince feuding with his bastard brother (Jim Johnson and James Houton) are recast as a Union colonel and his ex-Confederate brother.  The exceptional Paul Slade Smith as Dogberry draws on generations of comic sheriffs-who doubtless drew on Dogberry.  The period makes for wonderful music: the soldiers enter singing "Marching Through Georgia," and resident composer Michael Keefe brilliantly resets a Shakespeare song to "Shenendoah."  Sean Grennan was born to play Benedick, taking pratfalls yet somehow maintaining his dignity, and Mary Ernster's easy swagger as Beatrice suggests Annie Oakley getting a man with the gun of her wit.  This well-matched comic pair powers the play without overpowering it.

"Much Ado About Nothing" is a Shakespeare comedy that directors love to play with.  The story has been placed in every era from Elizabethan England to Teddy Rooseveltian America, and, no matter where or when, its clever wordplay and romantic spirits present some of the Bard's happiest comic creations.

For its outdoor production at the Peabody Estate in Oak Brook, First Folio artistic director Alison C. Vesely has plunked the play down in post-Civil War New Mexico.

Don Pedro (Jim Johnson) and his cavalry cohorts are now Union soldiers, returning triumphant from the war to a welcoming fiesta in the adobe hacienda of Leonato (Neil Friedman), while Don John, the evil doer (James Houton), is an embittered former colonel of the Confederate Army, and his slimy henchmen (Rene Ruelas and Aaron Jose Munoz) are cigarillo-smoking Mexican banditos.  Dogberry (Paul Slade Smith), the play's comic constable, is now a long-haired, mustachioed, squeaky-voiced sheriff, and the members of his night watch are his bumbling deputies.

The Civil War aspect adds an extra edge to the play's conflict between good and evil, and the Old West locale provides chances for some lively square dancing and fiddle-playing.

Sean Grennan, as confirmed bachelor Benedick, puts his singularly carefree touch to his line readings, accompanying their pauses and interjections with rubber-faced grimaces and outrageous body language.  As his lovely partner in their skirmishes of wit, Mary Ernster, as Beatrice, radiates good cheer and common sense.