Theatre: Flushing-on-Avon

At the New York World's Fair, as a part of a Merrie England folderol, the Bard of Avon is played inside a replica of the famed Elizabethan Globe Theatre. Thanks to Director Margaret Webster, the Old Globe's Shakespeare is neither skittish nor stodgy. Four Shakespeare comedies—As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew—have been shrunk to a quarter their usual size, ironed without starch. Punched into shape as unceremoniously as a vaudeville act, Shakespeare's one-acters—runoff seven times a day—perk up.

Only one falls flat....