Stephen Weitz, left, and Gary Wright in CSF s The Inspector General. (Patrick Campbell)

You're probably not planning a trip to Russia this summer, but a little bit of Russia has come to Boulder.

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival is staging a 19th-century play by Nikolai Gogol titled "The Inspector General" and has hired a complement of Russian theater artists, including director Efim Zvenyatsky, to work on the project.

If you don't know the play, don't think Chekhov -- think vaudeville meets social satire. The play is considered a masterpiece and turning point in Russian theater. For certain it's a genre-blending production, a fanciful mix of broad comedy and dreamlike fantasy.

With CSF driving, the trip to the small Russian town where the play is set is a sometimes wonderfully strange, sometimes tedious adventure.

It's a rambling tale of a town's reaction to rumors of a visit by a government official. The visit reveals a culture of bribery and graft.

The play employs a centuries-old conceit -- mistaken identity. The town officials think Khlestakov (Stephen Weitz) is the Inspector, when he's actually a lout from the big city with a big appetite and no money. He's offered the royal treatment, and Khlestakov takes full advantage.

In Zvenyatsky's vision of the play, adapted to English by Julia Polshina, who also served as the director's translator during rehearsals in Boulder, the bribery and graft are taken to clownish extremes.

Whimsical pops, whizzes, whirrs and whistles underscore scenes. Costume and scenic designer Vladimir Koltunov draws playfully from several decades worth of Russian finery and creates an almost circus-like setting for the action.

Since this is a cultural-exchange experience, it's natural to compare and contrast. I think a visit by a federal official to an American small town would more likely be met with suspicion and firearms than false welcomes and bribes -- at least a visit that's worth satirizing. But there's relevance -- think of the brown-nosing that goes on in an office setting, the kind satirized in a TV sitcom like "The Office."

I don't know if it's a cultural contrast, or just the fact the play was written 170 years ago, but by contemporary taste, "The Inspector General" suffers from covering the same ground repeatedly and from giving too much time to superfluous characters. Brevity is the soul of wit and "The Inspector General's" soul is grandiose. The show could be streamlined by an hour and deliver a more entertaining punch.

Some of the anachronisms the cast members indulge in work and others don't. Calling one character Oompaloompavich is funny; a "rock 'n roll" chant is awkward.

The cast, though, has embraced their Gogol adventure, and the production comes alive is when they or Zvenyatstky bring inspiration to little moments.

A character snores under an umbrella and the umbrella opens and closes on his exhale and inhale. A scene where Weitz's Khlestakov seduces Marya, played by Jamie Ann Romero, crackles. Gary Wright is an excellent comic actor and the harried, conniving Mayor is right in his wheelhouse. Geoffrey Kent shines as the slick Postmaster.

It's fun to see Sam Sandoe, so often cast as stuffy or formal character, get to exercise his inner kid, especially when, as the town judge, he gets onto a table and acts like a crazed chicken.

And the more the production strays into bizarre territory, the more it flexes toward the cartoonish or even the grotesque, the more interesting it is. I mean, if we Americans are going to go all the way to Russia, we want to see something really different, don't we?

A final note, local audiences will be privy to a rare opportunity during the July 15 and 16 performances when four Russian actors step into four principal roles that are performed by American actors during the rest of the run. Those two performances will be bilingual, with the Russians speaking their native tongue and the rest of the American cast speaking English.

Clearly, they didn't have in-vitro fertilization in 1594. Because the mere existence of twins in Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors" somehow turns every single person on the island of Syracuse into a complete comedic moron.

"The Comedy of Errers," er, "Errors," is Shakespeare's first and shortest play, and if I might distill 400 years of critical analysis into one sentence: It's less possible to take seriously than, say,Charlie Sheen. So most directors just let loose with the "wacka wacka," and load it with easy modern pop-culture references like ... Charlie Sheen — usually to the delight of audiences who are easily intimidated by more substantive Shakespeare.

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival's crowd-pleasing presentation in Boulder takes a decidedly more unusual and sophisticated storytelling approach, without taking itself too seriously. In that way, it might be considered an apology for last year's over-the-top "The Taming of the Shrew."

This is the silly story of twin noblemen, both named Antipholus, and their twin servants, both named Dromio, separated at birth. Today, 20 years later, these daft (and still identically dressed!) dunces find themselves on the same island, obliviously breezing in and out of one another's circles, making for an impossible series of mistaken identities that somehow sustains five acts of frivolous fluff.

This is the first festival staging ever to employ co-directors. Carolyn Howarth and Daniel Stein seek to establish a physical, visual rhythm to match the story's comic, oral cadence. So while Howarth focused on the text and character, the Paris-trained Stein served as a kind of a visual choreographer.

And because this is a repertory festival and our twin directors had more actors available to them than the script calls for, they have created, I kid you not, a chorus of magical fish that serves to enhance both the creativity and clarity of the storytelling — while perpetrating a relentless stream of physical comedy on the humans that the Three Stooges would admire. It's all presented in an exaggerated vaudevillian style that lets you know it's all in good fun. Think of it asCharlie Chaplindoes Shakespeare.

It's essential you understand how the directors set the initial scene, which will be familiar to anyone who's seen Cirque du Soleil. Here, a fisherwoman (Leslie O'Carroll) lures her chorus of creatures from the sea using a pole. She's perhaps a disguised Roman goddess, the kind who toyed with mere mortals for sport. Her sea creatures, which possess magical powers, set into motion one magical day of comic chaos, like aMonty Python"Brigadoon." And if you don't catch on, good luck.

Most humorously,

What, again? Yep, Tom Coiner, left, and Gary Alan Wright as twin Dromios. (Glenn Asakawa provided by Colorado Shakespeare Festival)

The concept doesn't always hold up as well as the physical bits themselves do — a lot of stuffed fish toys get tossed around for inexplicable reasons. A recurring bell makes one wonder why no one answers the door. But don't think too hard on it: When jousters take up stuffed swordfish against each other, it's funny — just go with it.

Sunday was blustery in the outdoor Mary Rippon Theatre, but that couldn't match the hilarious bravado being bandied about by Josh Robinson and Stephen Weitz, who, as our twin Antipholuses (Antipholi?) share remarkably bad hair — and great comic gusto.

But the whole, deep cast exudes uncommon comic confidence and abandon. Tom Coiner and Gary Wright are magnificent as the beleaguered, battered Dromios. Karen Slack is a hoot as the lividly libidinous wife of one of our Antipholi (who cares which?) — and she's looking for satisfaction.

This wonderfully weird experiment seems sometimes at cross purposes. Its indulgences slow the very rhythm they work so hard to establish. A "Lion King" rip-off is too easy. And for a show that's above trading in easy pop-culture gags, it still manages to sneak in references to "Harry Potter," "Young Frankenstein,"John Wayne, "Thriller" and flatulence — each invariably drawing the biggest laughs of the night. So much for high-brow low-brow.

Then again, maybe this "Comedy" was getting so many laughs because the jokes can actually be heard. For the first time, every actor on the Rippon stage wore a mic, and even though they haven't quite mastered the new technology yet, it's the greatest single improvement to the festival experience since they finally got cushion-backed chairs.