Cross-dressing Shakespeare comedy disappointingly ham-fisted

Rebecca Taichman’s production of “Twelfth Night,” which is playing at McCarter Theatre through March 29, is like walking from William Shakespeare’s England into an overblown version of Alice’s Wonderland. Operatic music blasts from all angles, and the scenery mutates from ocean to rose garden. Somehow, it seems like the production tries just a little too hard: It whips itself up into a feverish frenzy that is out of proportion with Shakespeare’s light, nimble comedy, and while the stylized design of the show is visually stunning, the oppressive style threatens to overwhelm the play itself.

The play begins when Viola (Rebecca Brooksher) arrives, shipwrecked and half-drowned, on the shores of Illyria. In a fit of logic that only Shakespeare could pull off, she decides to dress herself as a male and serve as attendant to the Duke Orsino (Christopher Innvar). When Viola puts on her male guise and assumes the name Cesario, she dons the jacket of her twin brother Sebastian (Kevin Isola); in a sense, she is both twins at once. Through a complicated series of plot twists, Viola falls in love with Orsino, yet she, as Cesario, must deliver the duke’s overtures of love to Olivia (Veanne Cox), who in turn falls in love with Cesario. Brooksher does an admirable, if slightly stiff, job as the play’s anchor. She tends to err on the side of sober caution rather than wild excess, which provides a necessary counterbalance to the intense theatricality that the rest of the production presents.

The set design is stunning. Through most of the first act, the stage is drenched in icy blue; grief and solemnity are the chief forces at work. Orsino is a Byronic hero, his melancholy matching the dark, somber tones of the production. Even Feste (Stephen DeRosa), the jester, can’t brighten the mood — his twists of logic are briefly amusing but dissolve into chilly sighs. But lest we forget that this is a romantic comedy, the ice melts at the end of the first act into a surreal rose garden. Rose petals fall from the sky and accumulate like snowdrifts, cascading from hair and hands as a rather heavy-handed metaphor for burgeoning love. The interlude music throughout the production was unnecessary and almost detracted from the incredible visual impact of the sets, lighting and costumes.

Illyria is a paradise of fools, and once the fools appear in full force, the production brightens considerably. Sir Toby Belch (Rick Foucheux), Fabian (J. Fred Shiffman) and Maria (Nancy Robinette) — the trio of coarse, mischievous servants — gleefully plot their various tricks. They are helped, or perhaps hindered. by Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Tom Story), a lovesick swain sighing for Olivia. Story’s Andrew is a cross between a Victorian dandy and a spoiled 8-year-old boy who is far too eager to please with his own silliness. The sight of a pajama-clad grown man doing the caterpillar across the McCarter stage outside the context of a Triangle Club show is certainly memorable, but Story goes overboard in his role, even in a part that allows for quite a bit of deliberate overacting. His shriek becomes a tic, an interjection that Story inserts whenever he can’t think of anything else to do. Andrew morphs from foppish fool to frenetic teakettle, and the metamorphosis is not welcome.

Ted van Griethuysen is an excellently stuffy Malvolio — clearly, van Griethuysen is a Shakespeare veteran who navigates his way around the language with ease. Van Griethuysen’s attempts to creak Malvolio’s mouth into a smile is a highlight of the show, and he carries off to perfection the hilarious scene in which Malvolio believes that Olivia has written a love letter he found. The well-choreographed scene also uses the large painted roses in the set with one of this production’s rare ironic winks. In moments like these, the wild theatricality transforms into something quite effervescent and wonderful rather than oppressive.

Miranda Hoffman’s costume design strikes just the right note of fantastical liveliness: It enhanced, but never overtook, the characters that wore them. Andrew’s pricelessly hilarious silk pajamas with green and pink stripes and a nightcap were perhaps the exception to the rule that the costume not overwhelm the character, but in this production, the exception that proved the rule. This outfit, playing a relatively minor role in the context of the play as a whole, encapsulated Andrew: a narcissistic little boy in the guise of a grown man.

In the play’s second act, Olivia exchanges her black attire for an array of gowns distinguishable from each other only in color. Cox’ rendition of Olivia is bafflingly overtheatrical, swinging between majestic ice queen and lioness in heat with very little in between. Perhaps Cox is trying to explore the ideas of duality and layered identities which underlie “Twelfth Night,” creating a character who is herself a binary contradiction. But Cox is at her best by far in the final scenes of the play, when the twins’ true identities are revealed, and Olivia regally presents herself as a “sister” to Orsino. We finally see the type of restrained yet commanding force that we lacked in her intensely bipolar interpretation of the role. Appropriately, she ended the play in a blue version of her gown, visually as well as emotionally bringing together the elements of fire and ice.

The way several characters pronounce “Illyria” makes the name sound almost exactly like “delirium.” As the play winds on, the production deliberately — almost doggedly — drives toward a delirious, fervent, Wonderland-esque madness. “Is this but a dream?” asks the bewildered Sebastian upon finding himself on the business end of Olivia’s hectic but misplaced raptures. He resolves the issue by assuring himself of his own physicality and rationalizes that he would not be able to breathe and smell the world around him if he were dreaming. Would that we could be so sure ourselves.