After a triumphant West Side Story in 2018, director Brooke Hardman Ditchfield and the performing arts program at Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School have turned to the lighter side of Shakespeare for this year’s musical: As You Like It.

West Side Story was a tragedy, Romeo and Juliet rewritten and updated for the 1960s to become an enduring­ (and tear-jerking) classic of musical theatre. Introduced in 2017, Shaina Taub and Laurie Woolery’s musical adaptation of As You Like It is an evening of sheer, unabashed fun that nonetheless offers some serious lessons about love, loyalty and self-respect.

Bella Giordano plays Rosalind. — Mark Alan Lovewell

“It’s unlike anything we’ve done before,” Ms. Ditchfield told the opening night audience at the Performing Arts Center Thursday night. Parents, grandparents and siblings, many holding floral bouquets in their laps, gazed raptly at the stage as the action unfolded. One or two of the smallest audience members wore pajamas.

The show’s book is faithful to the original language of Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy, thought to be written in 1599, but Ms. Taub’s contemporary music and lyrics take the place of many scenes that introduced the characters’ complexities and explained their backstories and motives.

With 22 musical numbers, there’s more song and dance than spoken word in this As You Like It. The folky theme song is based on the original play’s most famous speech, which begins “All the world’s a stage,” and is sung by the character Jacques, played by Josephine Orr as a serious-minded tree sitter reminiscent of Julia Butterfly Hill. She wears a bandana and carries a composition book, so we can see she’s a scholar.

Young hero Orlando’s first speech, in which he complains that his older brother Oliver has kept him in ignorance and treated him like an animal, becomes the folk-pop anthem The Man I’m Supposed to Be, with its defiant chorus “I am the son of Sir Rowland de Boys/And his spirit grow grow grows in me... So brother better beware/I’m becoming the man I’m supposed to be.”

Christian Schmidt is Duke Senior. — Mark Alan Lovewell

Rosalind, the heroine, is no happier at court. In her defining song, Rosalind, Be Merry, she rants against being forced into a stereotypical female role as her handmaidens deck her in a fancy gown. In the last verse, her rebellion sags as she wonders, “If you had no role to play/Then who would you be?”

The musical also makes four of the play’s eight lovers into same-sex couples, with a quadruple wedding following the comic twists and turns that arise from Rosalind’s posing as a young man named Ganymede.

The comedic parts of the play take place in the Forest of Arden, a getaway invented by Shakespeare along the lines of the forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, only minus the magic, fairies and rude mechanicals.

Rosalind and her cousin Celia have fled there from the court, where tyrannical Duke Frederick presides and violence is entertainment.

Harold Lawry as Touchstone and Wyatt Belisle as Andy. — Mark Alan Lovewell

The Vineyard production brilliantly localizes the court’s wrestling match, which the musical casts as Mexican lucha libre, by turning it into a contest of capoeiristas played by Michael Whatley, JP Alves and Corinne Kurtz (Chelsea McCarthy took the latter role Thursday).

By comparison with the court and its conflicts, Arden is a happy, cooperative place, where Rosalind’s exiled father Duke Senior leads a chorus of singers, drummers and dancers in praising their simple, natural lifestyle there.

Puppeters as deer crouch timidly nearby as the exiles sing “we will learn to see the forest for the trees,” while the skeptical Jacques periodically interrupts the song with opposing points of view.

Ms. Taub’s songs and settings are well suited to the accomplished young singers in the MVRHS performing arts program. The live onstage band, directed by Abigail Chandler, included guitarist Brian Weiland, keyboardist Charlie Esposito, drummer Anthony Esposito and bassist Mike Tinus.

Ms. Hardman recruited about 17 younger students from town schools to portray the younger Orlando and Rosalind at different phases of their lives, and Ardenite children in the big song and dance numbers.

Youth from the Island's grammar schools were enlisted to round out the cast. — Mark Alan Lovewell

There’s even a Little Jacques, “a young girl with ideas” as the program describes her, who appears at the end of the play to reprise All the World’s a Play. It’s a touching moment at the end of an evening that passes almost too swiftly.

There cannot be anything happening on Island between now and Sunday afternoon that is more entertaining than this show, with its youthful cast, lively music, colorful costuming and choreographed dances.

You may also come away with the thought that Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden and the real Martha’s Vineyard have a number of things in common. Both are peaceful, rural settings, far from cities, where the locals are visited by wealthy and powerful urbanites who are seeking a simpler way of life, or just trying to get away.

And both are popular places to get married.