Sexy, glamorous and madly in love

SAN DIEGO —  Cleopatra was a queen of “infinite variety,” according to Shakespeare’s lines in “Antony and Cleopatra.”

Variety -- albeit not quite “infinite” -- is also a guiding principle for the Old Globe’s first Shakespearean repertory festival in more than 20 years. Although the festival uses the same 29 actors in three plays and alternates performances within the same alfresco venue in Balboa Park, the plays themselves are very different.

The season began Wednesday with “Antony and Cleopatra,” the panoramic tragedy from Shakespeare’s mid-career, more often studied than staged. Tonight brings the familiar comedy “As You Like It” from Shakespeare’s salad days (to borrow another phrase from “Antony and Cleopatra”). On Sunday, it’s time for the rarely seen “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” which Shakespeare co-wrote at the end of his career with John Fletcher.

The whole shebang is under the artistic direction of Darko Tresnjak, who personally staged “Antony” and “Kinsmen.” “Antony” launches the festival in high style, with actors who are young but well-spoken and expertly cast, and several staging ideas that enrich the text.

The story of the Roman general who’s distracted from his duties by the irresistible Egyptian monarch is fairly irresistible itself. If their romance and squabbles were happening today, they would be on the front page of every tabloid.

One of Tresnjak’s ideas, an overactive turntable during a Roman summit meeting, is distracting. But his primary enhancements, at the end of each of the production’s two parts, work splendidly.

Shortly before intermission, Antony is back in Rome, finally acceding to Caesar’s call to duty. Their alliance has been cemented by Antony’s quickie marriage to Caesar’s sister Octavia and by a bacchanalian party.

Tresnjak has the dour Caesar slip out of the party early. He fetches his sister and brings her to a perch overlooking the revelry, where they soon see Antony cavorting with a dancing girl. The embarrassed Antony immediately overcompensates, hoisting Caesar by the shoulders and moving him aside, to take his groom’s place at Octavia’s side. It’s a canny way to demonstrate the tenuous nature of the marriage -- and the alliance.

The first half ends with the spectacle of Antony’s return to Egypt and to Cleopatra -- imagery that the text describes but doesn’t dramatize. Their reunification takes place on the stage’s upper level, while the abandoned Caesar and Octavia and their cohorts stand with backs to the audience, glumly looking up at the happy sybarites.

The adulterers’ happiness won’t last, of course. They are soundly thrashed by Caesar’s forces after intermission. Yet at the end of the play, after Antony’s graceless suicide and Cleopatra’s prettier encounter with an asp, Tresnjak brings out the white-clad spirit of Antony and the other deceased members of the queen’s retinue so their souls can sail off together into bliss -- an echo of the lovers’ first meeting.

Although it might sound sappy, this ending plays successfully as the director’s defiant refusal to let grim Caesar have the final word. With melancholy music on the soundtrack, it avoids a surfeit of sugar and serves as a suitably grand finale.

The title performances are dynamic. Sara Surrey’s queen is taller and has more vitality than anyone else in her court, which adds comedy to the images of her attendants scrambling to provide her with assistance. She wears a deeply low-cut gown; her sense of her sexuality is palpable. So is her sense of strategically employing her sexuality, as when she literally leads Caesar’s messenger by her finger -- and then slaps Antony when he angrily suggests that her manner with the messenger is a betrayal.

Dan Snook’s randy Antony stands head to head with Cleopatra and rises above James Joseph O’Neil’s Caesar. His marriage to Katie MacNichol’s primly ringleted Octavia looks especially hollow. His cocky confidence and blistering rages are persuasive products of the same ambivalent character.

As Antony’s cynical advisor, Greg Thornton has a face that easily suggests a skeptical sneer, yet he also handles his lyrical description of the lovers’ first meeting with appropriate awe. Brian Sgambati is a commandingly virile Pompey, and Bruce Turk adds sporadic notes of mysticism as a spooky-looking soothsayer.

The costumes and lighting help maintain clarity through all the scene changes. And the sound system manages to compete successfully with the too-frequent drone of airplanes flying to the nearby airport.

*

‘Antony and Cleopatra’

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday, July 17, 21, 25, 27, 31; Aug. 6, 8, 10, 14, 18, 20, 25, 26; Sept. 2, 3, 9, 12, 14, 16, 17, 22, 26; Oct. 2 and 3

Price: $19 to $55

Contact: (619) 234-5623

Running Time: 3 hours

Dan Snook...Mark Antony

Sara Surrey...Cleopatra

James Joseph O’Neil...Caesar

Greg Thornton...Enobarbus

Brian Sgambati...Pompey/

Scarus

Jonathan McMurtry...Lepidus/

Old Soldier

Deborah Taylor...Charmian

Katie MacNichol...Octavia

Bruce Turk...Soothsayer/

Euphronius

Graham Hamilton...Eros

Liam Craig...Menas/Thidias

Charles Janasz...Agrippa

Daniel Jay Shore...Dolabella

Neil Shah...Alexas

Bree Elrod...Iras

Michael Newman...Mardian

Gregor Paslawsky...Maecenas

By William Shakespeare. Directed by Darko Tresnjak. Set by Ralph Funicello. Costumes by Linda Cho. Lighting by York Kennedy. Sound by Christopher Walker. Fights by Steve Rankin. Choreographer Bonnie Johnston. Stage manager Leila Knox.