Shakespearean Mood Swings in Progress The young man has been caught by his best friends in a seriously compromising position. One of four forsworn swains in the splashy, hit-or-miss musical adaptation of Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost," which opened on Monday night at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, this red-faced lad has been found - oh, the shame of it - composing a love poem to a member of the opposite sex. That amounts to treason, since the man, Longaville by name and winningly played by Bryce Pinkham, has taken a solemn vow with his pals to have nothing to do with women. But what's really embarrassing is that, for some reason, Longaville has been venting his poetic side dressed in sequined hot pants with a skimpy matching vest. And, oh yes, he's been hoofing like Ruby Keeler to music that sounds suspiciously like the finale of "A Chorus Line," with his own personal high-kicking backup tap dancers. Thus discovered, Longaville resorts to words uttered by many a soul surprised in flagrante delicto: "I can explain!" No you can't, dude. And I'll bet you the talented creators of this spirited but slapdash show - the writer and director Alex Timbers and the composer Michael Friedman - can't, either. I mean, why would Longaville, who has so far been presented as an amiable slacker-stoner type, turn out to harbor razzle-dazzle Broadway fantasies? For that matter, why did the clean-cut King of Navarre (Daniel Breaker, the donkey in the Broadway "Shrek"), who had initiated this chastity pledge, morph into a pumped-up black-leather rock star only minutes earlier, as he revealed that he, too, had fallen in love? And why full Elizabethan costume, and a lute accompanist, for yet another declaration, this one by their chum Dumaine (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe)? The point appears to be that love makes fools of everyone, which is also the point - or a point - of the Shakespeare play that inspired this woozy frolic. But comedy is funniest, and truest, when people make fools of themselves in ways peculiar to their characters. In this production, there is seldom a real connection between the singers and their songs. It's as if the musical numbers, which cover a gamut of pastiche styles, had been assigned at random from a mixtape playlist. Disconnectedness pervades this "Love's Labour's Lost," which is a surprise, given the triumphant and audacious cohesiveness of Mr. Timbers and Mr. Friedman's "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson," which improbably used emo music to explore 19th-century populism. It's not that the idea of translating 16th-century students into 21st-century frat house alumni, searching for a purpose in life, feels strained. On the contrary, recent revivals of this once rarely performed comedy have summoned implicit parallels to the kind of romantic spring break romps that have been showing up in movie theaters at least since "Where the Boys Are." This has been true even when the setting and costumes remain Elizabethan, as in the delicious touring version from the London-based Shakespeare's Globe of several years ago. But this production - which features a polished and personable cast that also includes the young Broadway veterans Colin Donnell ("Anything Goes") and Patti Murin ("Lysistrata Jones") - often feels as directionless as its identity-challenged characters, who are struggling to figure out who they are as they enter adulthood. The girls who drive the boys crazy are played by Maria Thayer, Kimiko Glenn, Audrey Lynn Weston and the charming Ms. Murin. The show, which uses sporadic stretches of Shakespeare's original text, keeps trying on different stances and voices like an attention-deficient kid in a Halloween costume shop. Since the director here is the incredibly inventive Mr. Timbers (who also did the current Public Theater hit "Here Lies Love"), some of these guises are quite entertaining in themselves. The numbers include 1950s-style girl-group ditties about heartbreak boys, down-and-dirty rap serenades, Devo-esque robotics and a nose-thumbing put-down of the idle rich that brings to mind "Finian's Rainbow." Then there's that out-of-left field musical ode to the fleshy appeal of cats (sung by Justin Levine, as a sidekick to the swaggering grad student Armado, played by Caesar Samayoa). These are performed on John Lee Beatty's witty, slickly tacky sylvan resort of a set, which manages to make the background views of Central Park look synthetic, as if designed to order by a time-share corporation. The costumes (Jennifer Moeller) and choreography (Danny Mefford) have a kitschy pizazz to match. Yet - aside from a blissful parody of a One Direction-like boy band led by Mr. Donnell and a pop power ballad sung by Rebecca Naomi Jones as a barmaid - Mr. Friedman's tuneful songs come across as frustratingly incomplete, like clever sketches for complete portraits. Despite the fancy full-dress production, the whole enterprise starts to feel (perhaps appropriately, but not satisfyingly) like a college revue, slapped together by honors students during a Red Bull-fueled all-nighter. This sensibility inevitably includes a certain arch self-consciousness about form and content. Such a perspective is not so far from Shakespeare's original play, in which the sonnet-spinning characters learn that man cannot live by words alone. This "Love's Labour's Lost" occasionally latches on to its own musical-comedy language, equivalent to callow Elizabethan versifying, as in an ingenious solo in which Mr. Donnell's Berowne deconstructs, and then accepts, a song and its clichés as he sings. On the other hand, numbers in which the characters complain about the unsatisfying futures that await them ("Are you a man or just the plan your parents made?") have a pasted-on, perfunctory topicality. It is perhaps unfortunate that the day before I saw "Love's Labour's Lost," I caught Josh Whedon's wonderful film adaptation of Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing," which exists with a natural, charged sensuality and without strain in a contemporary setting. "Love's Labour's Lost" isn't the master comedy that "Much Ado" is, and only purists will object to most liberties taken with a show that is, by Shakespeare's standards, a trifle. But even light works of art need a sustained point of view to keep them afloat. Mr. Timbers's interpretation becomes airborne only in fits and starts. As a silly diversion for the silly season, it passes muster, but only just. Love's Labour's Lost Based on the play by William Shakespeare; songs by Michael Friedman; book adapted and directed by Alex Timbers; sets by John Lee Beatty; costumes by Jennifer Moeller; lighting by Jeff Croiter; sound by Acme Sound Partners; music director, Justin Levine; choreography by Danny Mefford; wig design by Leah J. Loukas; orchestrations by Mr. Friedman and Mr. Levine; music supervisor, Matt Stine; music contractor, Antoine Silverman; dramaturge, Anne Davison; production stage manager, Arthur Gaffin; associate artistic director, Mandy Hackett; associate producer, Maria Goyanes; general manager, Steven Showalter; production executive, Ruth E. Sternberg. A Shakespeare in the Park production, presented by the Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, artistic director; Patrick Willingham, executive director. At the Delacorte Theater, Central Park (midpark at West 81st Street), (212) 539-8750, shakespeareinthepark.org. Through Sunday. WITH: Daniel Breaker (King), Kevin Del Aguila (Dull), Colin Donnell (Berowne), Rachel Dratch (Holofernes), Andrew Durand (Boyet), Kimiko Glenn (Maria), Jeff Hiller (Nathaniel), Rebecca Naomi Jones (Jaquenetta), Justin Levine (Moth), Patti Murin (Princess), Lucas Near-Verbrugghe (Dumaine), Bryce Pinkham (Longaville), Charlie Pollock (Costard), Caesar Samayoa (Armado), Maria Thayer (Rosaline), Audrey Lynn Weston (Katherine) and Michael R. Douglass and Bradley Gibson (Ensemble).