As I’ve mentioned before, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Ore., does far more than just Shakespeare (though it’s been doing that well for more than 80 years).

In the span of a week recently, my husband and I experienced two delightful performances which proved excellent examples of the versatility and talent the theater company exhibits each season. The festival boasts three main performance spaces: the original outdoor Elizabethan stage; the indoor Bowmer theater, which seats around 600; and the intimate Thomas theater, seating 270 on three sides of a flexible performance area. Outdoor performances will start up shortly, so this week we saw one play in each of the other two spaces.

I have to admit that, although I was an English major, I never read Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and knew only the barest outlines of its plot. I looked forward, then, to this world-premiere adaptation of the novel with very few preconceived expectations of my own. The set on the Bowmer stage was minimalist, with a series of bare ramps and steps that served as everything from the marshes of Pip’s youth to Miss Haversham’s spooky mansion to the streets of London. The mid-19th-century costumes were lavish and lovely, and the actors’ performances movingly told Pip’s story, with each person playing several parts.

A series of three or four individuals at a time serve as a Greek chorus/narrators to set the scenes and move the story forward. I found the director and playwright succeeded in adapting a lengthy, complicated story into a moving, entertaining piece of theater. Our second foray to Ashland also involved a world-premiere adaptation of a very different sort — Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeoman of the Guard. Director Sean Graney and cohorts Andra Simon and Matt Kahler have previously adapted other G & S operettas, placing each in new settings. This Yeoman is set in the Old West, with the music having a distinct twang and influences from bluegrass and Appalachian folk to classic country music and honky-tonk. Though the entire performance runs just 90 minutes (with a one-minute intermission; no, that’s not a typo), it actually begins a good 30 minutes before the official opening number.

The actors-singers all play (or learned to play) the instruments used in the production (banjo, guitar, mandolin, fiddle, dobro, etc.), and they were out mingling with the audience and playing and singing a wide range of songs (and the audience was singing along) from Johnny Cash to Taylor Swift. It actually might be more accurate to state that the audience was mingling with the actors. On the Thomas stage, audience members holding “Promenade” tickets (we did not) were actually seated on the stage (which included hay bales, large rocking horses and a pool table) and were invited to shift from place to place as the action unfolded in, around and sometimes on top of them.

There was even a full-service bar at the back of the set which all audience members were invited to visit any time during the performance. We thoroughly enjoyed this rollicking, high-energy musical with talented and nimble artists singing, playing and frequently ad-libbing their way through this clever adaptation. Gilbert and Sullivan purists might quibble, but everyone in the theater that night certainly had a rip-roaring good time.

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor