Mark Rector and Quinton Cockrell in The Taming of the Shrew

Forget everything you have ever known or feared about William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.

The Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival's joyous new production of the comedy is not like anything you've ever seen.

From its unorthodox setting - a Mississippi River riverboat casino in 1889 - to the unconventional way in which its hero and heroine fall in love, the Shakespeare Festival's Shrew is likely to surprise its audience from beginning to end. Those prepared to be put off by 400-year-old theater will find themselves pulled right in. And those looking to be angered by outdated attitudes toward the sexes will find themselves wanting to embrace everyone onstage.

As someone says toward the end of the show, in a line not originally penned by Shakespeare: ''I love these guys!''

Some of the surprises will seem like old news to people who love Shakespeare, who don't have to be convinced that he's funny. And some will seem not entirely unexpected to people who realize that there's something to The Taming of the Shrew other than putting a woman in her place.

It's the happy combination of fresh ideas that director Jim Helsinger and his cast have brought to this familiar comedy that makes it a delight - and the best work the Shakespeare Festival ever has done.

The unexpected actually begins before the play does in Helsinger's production, which leads with an elaborate joke (one I don't want to give away here) and never lets up. According to the premise of this production, Shrew is being performed by an itinerant troupe on a Mississippi riverboat, which offers gambling to the good people of New Orleans along with loftier theatrical fare.

Helsinger uses the setting to underscore a money-conscious community in which a clutch of suitors bid for Bianca, the beautiful younger daughter of rich Baptista Minola, and a trio of husbands wages bets on their wives. The unusual time and place, too, are part of the director's attempt to make this familiar play seem new. Yet he and his company have brought so much life to Shrew that the setting, however appealing, doesn't matter at all.

Such vitality shows up in the care with which even the smallest characters are made real. There's hardly an extraneous body onstage: Even a minor servant such as the one Maria T. Flores plays has a personality, and the 13 or 14 more important characters are beautifully drawn.

Mark Rector, Quinton Cockrell and Greg Wood make a nicely eclectic group of suitors for Bianca - Rector (who is made up to look like Col. Sanders) amusing in his vagueness, Cockrell in his greed and Wood in the simple-mindedness of his love. Lucy Deakins makes a wonderfully duplicitous Bianca, who is simperingly sweet to her father and bratty behind his back. And the rest of the large cast, almost to a person, is first-rate.

What makes this Shrew a lot more than just a neat little comedy, though, is the way Helsinger and his two leads, Dan McCleary and Suzanne O'Donnell, have taken Shakespeare's story and found in it a story for our time. No one has grafted onto this play a meaning that is not there; instead, the show painstakingly explores what's inside Shakespeare's words.

McCleary's Petruchio, for example, clearly sees something he likes in Katherina's enraged spirit, and O'Donnell's Kate responds just as clearly to something in his kiss. This Petruchio explains his mistreatment of Kate seriously, in a direct address to the audience: ''I intend that all is done in reverend care of her.'' And this Kate falls in love with Petruchio gradually, in full view of the audience: She is a changed woman, and her childish tantrums are gone.

O'Donnell, who has played such heroines as Rosalind and Ophelia in previous festivals, is a pint-sized spitfire as Kate; her jaw juts out as if she's begging someone to try to slug her, and her fits of fury are something to behold. And McCleary is a consummately self-possessed Petruchio, so glib in his outrageousness that he recalls a more talented Bill Murray, but with a deep well of maturity underneath.

Helsinger has brought plenty of imagination to the details of this production: Kate and Bianca shriek through several of the early scene changes, and the elder sister threatens the younger with methods of physical harm that have to be seen to be believed. The elegance of the physical production helps, as well, and so does the lively Dixieland music from the five performers who call themselves Billy Bard's Back Bayou Band.

Some people might quibble about the malfunctioning body microphone that one actor had to deal with on opening night, or about the inevitable interruptions from planes and sirens, or about the fact that noise backstage seems to come from stage right when the commotion is supposed to be stage left. But I'm not one of those people. This is Shakespeare as it ought to be played - clever, exuberant, wise. Maybe it was Shakespeare, after all, who said he loves these guys.