There's a theory that Shakespeare wrote "The Merry Wives of Windsor" at the request of Queen Elizabeth I, who so much enjoyed the character of Falstaff in the "Henry IV" plays that she wanted to see him again — in a comedy.

If that is so, then the genius dramatist did his best to put the character in the midst of a slapstick, middle-class swirl about suspected adultery that was certainly popular, but not his best work.

With the third and last show in this summer's Hawaii Shakespeare Festival, director Tony Pisculli distracts us with an all-male cast and a curious decision to give the play a 1940s look. While all-male casts were the norm in Elizabethan England, the cross-dressing in this production adds only minimally to the farce.

When Falstaff attempts to court both women simultaneously, the central scene has the wives (Shawn Thomsen and Chris Riel) play a trick that gets him shunted away in a basket of dirty clothes and dumped in a river. Later, disguised as a witch, he's beaten black and blue. Still later, he's tormented in the woods by a group of townsfolk disguised as fairies — an obligatory moonlight masque that resolves the plot, but that keeps a modern audience in the theater for an unnecessary 30 minutes.

No doubt the Elizabethans found this hilarious. And, while the slapstick works up to a point in this production, we find ourselves checking the program much too often to sort out the double casting and keep the characters straight.

The trickster wives and Spencer Moon as the meddling Mistress Quickly push hard against the dialogue as if they were Lucy and Ethel cooking up a scheme, while Ryan Sueoka as young Anne Page tends to melt into the stage picture.

Jeremy Dowd's Falstaff is a semi-braggart in a smoking jacket and fez who is sufficiently oily and greasy, but who never rises above simply being the butt of the other characters.

The best monologue goes to Stephen Mead as Master Ford, lamenting his wife's suspected treachery, but it works mostly as a set piece that doesn't mesh with the tone set by the rest of the play.

Reb Beau Allen is fun as a geeky Abraham Slender, and Troy Apostol is suave all the way down to his martini glass as Fenton. Brian Devera is all incomprehensible French accent and Hercule Poirot moustache, while Ryan Wuestewald hovers in the periphery as a nervous Sir Hugh.

There are no royal figures in this play, so Carlynn Wolfe's costume plot is restricted to running up some rather plain gingham checked house dresses to match the post-war period.