Almost four centuries after young Will Shakespeare first made his mark as a playwright, almost-as-young Stephen Sondheim began the opening number for his first complete score, "Tragedy tomorrow, / Comedy tonight." And so it is at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival this summer - four plays by Shakespeare among the 12 being offered, two of them out-and-out comedies and two variously identified as comedies, romances, or "problem plays." They range from the very early "Two Gentlemen of Verona" to "The Tempest," Shakespeare's last play. Between the two, his dozen and a half comedies include "As You Like It," one of his most popular plays, and "The Winter's Tale." The foursome illuminates how Shakespeare's comedies explore the darkness and resilience of the human heart.

Certain themes keep recurring in the comedies, including the characters' capacity for folly and self-delusion before they finally pull themselves together, grow up, and find happiness by the skin of their teeth. That makes "Two Gentlemen" a good place to start - a primer of sorts in which the inexperienced playwright tries out the devices and tropes he'll return to with ever-deepening insight. Watch especially for Proteus, the first of Shakespeare's many clowns, whose dog Crab is one of the great scene-stealers in English drama even though he never says a word. Will he be played by a dog, or an actor dressed like a dog?

In the 16th century, women didn't appear in plays; young men acted the female roles. Always a man of the theater, Shakespeare has a field day with the conceit in "Two Gentlemen." Because Julia, disguised as a young man, agrees to play the part of a young woman, she must replace her disguise with a costume. One person manages three degrees of separation entirely on her own.

"The Tempest" follows Prospero - a usurped Duke who has become an invincible wizard - as he moves from hardhearted vengeance and "rough magic" to forgiveness and an acceptance of mortality in which his "every third thought shall be my grave." In addition to Shakespeare's sympathetic intelligence and dazzling audacity, and the play's mix of sweet romance and boisterous comedy, what makes this production essential is the return of Christopher Plummer, one of our greatest actors, as Prospero.

"The Winter's Tale," the season's second comedy/romance and one of Shakespeare's underrated plays, emphasizes the importance of the happy ending to comedy, no matter how ambiguous or tentative. The play comes perilously close to wintry tragedy for three acts before it turns back toward spring in the last two. Some of the plot shifts feel arbitrary, but Shakespeare was always more interested in character than in the mere logic of a story line.

Christopher Hampton's "Dangerous Liaisons," adapted from an 18th century French novel by Pierre Choderios de Lacios, is a different kind of comedy. Its combination of decadence and moral flaccidity, especially when it comes attired in silks and brocades, speaks to us in our own strange time as we impose Puritanical prissiness on our public figures but reserve license for ourselves. Over the last two decades, in Hampton's play as well as in several movie adaptations, "Liaisons" has found responsive audiences.

This year's musicals demonstrate how varied the form can be, from "Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris" to "Kiss Me, Kate" to "Evita." "Jacques Brel" is a cabaret revue devoted to the Belgian songwriter's gritty romanticism. "Kiss Me, Kate" is Cole Porter's greatest musical, and "Evita" arguably the best work by Andrew Lloyd Webber, that master of musical bombast. The show's intense theatricality makes us less troubled than we otherwise might be about lyricist Tim Rice's tin ear and Weber's faux arias.

"Kiss Me, Kate" demonstrates that the best musicals rely on melodic songs whose lyrics combine sentiment with wit to enrich predictable plots whose characters engage in that primal struggle involving love and sex, culminating in marriage. "Kate" finds good humor in a backstage story about two preening stars, whose egos get in the way of their falling back in love, and the sparring characters they play, Kate and Petruchio from "The Taming of the Shrew." Porter draws some of his lyrics from Shakespeare's dialogue and even manages to rhyme nearly every one the Bard's plays in the witty (and bawdy) "Brush Up Your Shakespeare."

J.M. Barrie's combination of fantastical adventure, childhood romance, and domestic comedy, "Peter Pan," receives its first Stratford production. While it will always charm children, its underlying combination of wit and sadness also makes it a play for adults.

Completing the season are "Do Not Go Gentle," Leon Pownall's one-man portrait of the bardic Welsh poet and world class drunk, Dylan Thomas; Michel Tremblay's "For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again," about a mother with a gift for exasperating but lovable exaggeration; and George F. Walker's transformation of John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera," into "King of Thieves," now set in a nightclub in New York City in 1928. Does it remind anybody of a 1973 caper movie starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford?

2010 Stratford Shakespeare Festival

Through October 31

Stratford, Ontario, Canada

800-567-1600, stratfordfestival.ca