Grant and Hepburn would fit right in amid the white ties and tails of director Mark Rucker's production, which makes Shakespeare's romantic comedy glisten with a fine coating of 1930s Hollywood gloss.

Elegantly dressed gentlemen break into a sophisticated soft shoe at a masked ball, and couples fox-trot to a Cole Porter tune. A group of men discuss good-humored mischief on the putting green, and a villain with slicked-back hair plots revenge while he draws on a thin cigar.

Rucker's 1930s-style glamour makes a charming confection out of Much Ado About Nothing, a comedy about sparring lovers that is one of Shakespeare's most-familiar plays. If the individual performances in this production do not seem quite as finely wrought as those from the same company in the festival's current staging of Hamlet, the overall effect is still a crowd-pleaser - as easy to swallow as a dry martini on a cool summer night.

Rucker has directed Much Ado not as if it were set in 1930s Hollywood but rather as if some 1930s producer decided to make the show into a movie with the stars, the fashions and the popular songs of his time. The result is a comedy not rooted anywhere special but familiar all the same, with wisecracking hero and heroine, ingenuous young lovers and worldly musicians recognizable from a hundred Hollywood films.

The lighter side of Much Ado does seem to hail from some screwball plot, in which the hero's and heroine's friends scheme for the two to fall in love. Beatrice and Benedick are a sophisticated pair, clearly drawn to one another, who would rather bicker about the inconstancies of love than fall into it. But their friends conspire against them: Benedick's tell him that Beatrice loves him madly, and Beatrice's tell her that Benedick cannot do without her. The result is a hot-tempered match - ''Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably,'' Benedick says - but a match likely to last for life.

Yet Much Ado also has a darker side, in which a young man named Claudio, Benedick's friend and fellow soldier, falls in love at first sight with beautiful young Hero, Beatrice's cousin. Their marriage plans are shattered, though, when Don John, the bastard brother of the city's prince, connives with his followers to convince Claudio that Hero is unchaste. Claudio spurns her on their wedding day, and Hero swoons. Hoping to shame Claudio, Hero's family and friends pretend that she has died. Only when Benedick intervenes and the scoundrels are caught are Claudio and Hero reunited and wed.

Yet so much of the show is a joy that the darker (and, in this version, more plodding) parts don't really matter. The production looks wonderful - its performers garbed in glamorous black-and-white evening gowns, golf knickers and tennis whites; its stage decorated with grand piano and potted palms against a colorful backdrop of cherubs and flowers, all of it resembling the modish lobby of a grand hotel.

And the show sounds delightful as well, with ''Night and Day'' or ''Begin the Beguine'' in the background and Shakespeare's lyrics occasionally set to a 1930s tune. The little band of musicians - on clarinet, saxophone, piano, drum and bass - are like part of the cast, and nothing could seem more natural than when one of the prince's followers steps up to croon into the mike.

All of the festival's actors look elegant against this splendor, although some leave more of an impression than others. Patrick Stretch makes a nicely affected Benedick and Allison Daugherty an imperious Beatrice. Stretch, in particular, speaks a mile a minute, and both seem clever as they can be. Juliette Dunn's pert Hero and Darius Mannino's earnest Claudio are more one-dimensional, although of course they are written that way; Jim Helsinger - who plays the title role in the festival's Hamlet - is beautifully bloodless as the evil Don John, and David McCann finds a lovely civility in Don Pedro, the city's prince.

More fun though, are performers in a couple of the smaller roles - Suzanne O'Donnell as the sassy maid Margaret and especially the hilarious Paul Vogt as Dogberry, the malaprop-spouting constable who stumbles over Don John's plot. Dressed in filthy finery and sporting a wide, toothy smile, Vogt's Dogberry walks with a spring in his step, like a traveling salesman or a game-show host. Coupled with an apparently idiotic band of cohorts - John Jezior, William E. Dobbins IV, Scott Sophos and Nick Rodriguez - Vogt deserves the applause he gets every time he leaves the stage.

It is performances like his that make Shakespeare spring to life - along with the witty world in which Rucker has so deliciously placed the play. ''Man is a giddy thing,'' Benedick points out toward the end of this felicitous comedy. I suspect he would include woman as well, and this Much Ado knows exactly what Benedick means. At its best, it makes your head spin with glee.