Hollywood is a sex-obsessed, money-worshipping place full of stars who can't act. (You might want to write these revelations down.) Shakespeare is a playwright (still taking notes?) whose plays require actors who can act, and directors who understand that there is more to comedy than loud-and-vulgar. The theater is a place where you're supposed to see more than a fancy high-concept set, while big-budget movies back in the big-studio days were all "glamour and gluttony." (Not now, of course, not now.)

Because of these obvious mismatches, Ken Ludwig (Moon Over Buffalo, Lend Me a Tenor) decided to write a farce about a famous moment in film history when Hollywood and Shakespeare collided.

Shakespeare in Hollywood takes as its starting point the 1935 Warner Brothers movie version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Max Reinhardt, then Europe's most famous director, had fled the Nazis and wound up in the U.S. He had directed Dream on stage many times, but this time he would work with the studio's stable of stars: Mickey Rooney, Dick Powell, Groucho Marx, Olivia de Havilland, James Cagney and Joe E. Brown. It was a bizarre project.

Good material for a farce, especially since Ludwig's nifty gimmick is that the "real" Oberon, the king of the fairies, and his go-to elf, Puck, are transported out of the play and onto the set. The magic of enchantment mixes with the magic of movies, with two la-la lands: the back lot and the fairies' forest. Lots of comic potential there, especially once the magic flower's love potion gets into everybody's eyes and the couples regroup.

The problem is that the script is so crude and so banal that all the witty possibilities vanish. And, since Ludwig uses big chunks of Shakespeare, you need some actors—at least those playing Oberon and Puck—who can actually speak the heightened language, which this cast, with their very flat, very American voices cannot. So all of the real magic—the glorious poetry of Shakespeare's loveliest play—is, under Jiri Zizka's direction, swamped.

Michael Sharon seems to be playing Oberon as some soap-operatic romantic lead, and Caroline Tamas as Puck is less a sprite than a grotesque monkey with a laugh to shatter glass. The only redeeming moments come from Marcia Saunders as the gossip columnist Louella Parsons, and James Judy as Will Hays, the author of Hollywood's code of censorship.

Why am I not surprised to learn that the Royal Shakespeare Company, having commissioned Ken Ludwig to write Shakespeare in Hollywood, then declined to produce it? The Wilma should have been so smart.

SHAKESPEARE IN HOLLYWOOD Through Dec. 31, Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St., 215-546-7824