As You Like It

The second annual installment of the acclaimed Bridge Project at Brooklyn Academy of Music, which spotlights an equally mixed group of English and American actors, features Sam Mendes' productions of Shakespeare's "As You Like It" and "The Tempest." Yet even "As You Like It," the lighter of the two and the first to premiere, feels like two very different plays combined into one in Mendes' intelligent but slow production.

Mendes' takes an excessively dark approach to the first half of the play, which observes the plights of young Orlando and Rosalind in the Court of Duke Frederick and their eventual escape into the Forest of Arden, where Rosalind's father, the exiled Duke Senior, is already living with a band of outcasts. These scenes are played out against a bleak gray wall with dim lighting. And even when the protagonists finally reach Arden, it is harsh, wintry and gloomy.

For instance, Duke Frederick (played by the striking Michael Thomas, who also doubles as Duke Senior) is portrayed as a corrupt modern government executive. Right after intermission, he tortures Orlando's brother with waterboarding techniques.

But just as the play's dating and mating rituals are to commence, the dreary weather clears, the climate warms up, and Arden looks like a far happier place.

Mendes displays an impressive understanding of the text and is able to convey lots of detail with little scenery. And while the cast's frequent use of pausing emphasizes awkward tension, it slows down the production's pace too frequently.

Christian Camargo appears so contemplative and sensitive as Orlando that you feel he is better suited for Hamlet, which he played Off-Broadway last spring.

Juliet Rylance is very much in control in the difficult role of Rosalind, but also wildly expressive. In her scenes with Orlando as Ganymede, where she is a woman pretending to be a man who is pretending to be a woman, it is clear that the character is experiencing a newfound freedom from sexual mores and limitations.

Severely out of place with everyone else is the typically excellent Thomas Sadoski, who is too high-strung and manic as Rosalind's clown Touchstone, desperately screaming his lines with a rough delivery. On the other hand, Stephen Dillane is so low-key as the melancholy Jacques, who delivers the "Seven Ages of Man" speech, that you hardly notice him.

Let me stress that this is in no way a bad or even mediocre production. In fact, it's quite smart and occasionally engrossing. And I really look forward to checking out "The Tempest" next month. But at least for me, this "As You Like It" just never felt altogether dramatically convincing or emotionally moving.

BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St., 718-636-4100, bam.org. Through Mar 13.