Do you love Trashy Classics? Not the serious crap you’re supposed to appreciate. I mean the overwrought stuff that inflames your cheaper emotions.

My favorite Trashy Classic moment came during Buntport Theater’s “Titus Andronicus! The Musical” in 2002. The host, Professor P.S. McGoldstien, told us, with ripe, round tones, we were going on “a flight on that big bird called theatre – theatre with an R,E, of course.”

Then they took Shakespeare’s bloodiest play and turned it into a rousing musical comedy.

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival decided to go for it as well — with its current production of “The Three Musketeers,” which opened on Saturday outdoors at the Mary Rippon Theater on the CU campus.

It’s a big, splashy, period piece full of romance and swordplay, crowded with actors. It’s not ashamed to have fun, and be interesting. The production reaches deep into its theatrical bag of tricks and skills, and comes up with a winner.

“3M,” which was adapted from the Alexandre Dumas novel for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1999, is a three-hour, hell-bent-for-leather epic of French gallantry and scheming. It’s also a director’s nightmare – but Carolyn Howarth does a graceful, witty job of making it flow, leading a cast of nearly three dozen through its paces with nary a hitch.

Andrea Bechert’s sturdy scenic design is a series of stout period platforms that allow our heroes and villains to leap, fall, dash, slide and scamper with ease. The real burden of identification with such a large cast lies at the feet of the costume designer. Here, Anne Murphy has created a staggering set of emblematic outfits that fit the period and fix the players in our minds.

Someone else who should have gotten a directorial co-credit is Geoffrey Kent, who served as fight director (also Aramis), deserves a heads-up on this one. The clashing of steel takes up much of the play’s action.

The adventurous tale concerns the youthful d’Artagnan (Mat Hostetler), who teams up in 17th-century Paris with Porthos (Gary Wright), Athos (Stephen Weitz) and Aramis (Kent) to fight the ruthless machinations of Cardinal Richelieu (Ted Barton), Countess de Winter (Karen Slack), and the Count de Rochefort (Barzin Akhavan).

With me so far? Toss in a love interest (Constance, played Jennifer Le Blanc), a tragic queen (Alexandra C. Lewis), her dashing lover (Sean Tarrant), a supercilious king (Chip Person), a faithful servant (Planchet, played by Michael Kane), and flocks of soldiers, guards, courtiers, and you can see we are running out of room. All of the above acquit their roles with vigor and verve, and send that energy crackling out into the audience.

Now about the music.

It’s not a big problem for you if you liked the soundtracks of “A Knight’s Tale” or “Marie Antoinette.” Both movies exploited the juxtaposition of modern music with antiquated action. “3M” does it here, too, framing every scene with jarring rock and funk interpretation – as though Paul Shaffer and the boys were just offstage, taking us out of the break.

Not that bad, if you like playing “Name That Tune.” It’s garish and distracting, but the players sell the gag, moving in hilarious time to the tunes from scene to scene. Cheesy? Sure.

Maybe that’s the point. “3M” is a celebration of the fun that can be had with an old text, all bombast and effect. Throughout the show, the feeling that everyone is kidding slightly, playing it just a hair over the top, makes it a guilty pleasure, like medieval dinner theater.

In fact, the standout Friday evening was the actor who most inscrutably poked the audience in the ribs. Sean Tarrant plays the queen’s secret lover, the Duke of Buckingham, as an entity so self-consciously proud that that he just drifts vapidly through each scene. It is very hard to be funny, too, when one is standing, motionless, paying attention to the other actors. Without upstaging his fellow players, Tarrant draws laughs just by force of character.

And the dueling! There’s a lot. Do you like that kind of thing? Then you will like this. They do go at it in a number of stage-fight set-pieces in which all but the kitchen sink is utilized. The encyclopedic display is entertaining, distracting.

In truth, no matter how we try to tart it up, theater is the art of getting people to pay attention to you for an extended period of time. At times, the Festival has lost its attachment to that fundamental thread of need between performer and audience. Some wacky, misbegotten and just plain dull directorial concepts have trod the boards at CSF over the years.

The biggest change in CSF since Philip Sneed took over as Producing Artistic Director a year ago seems to be a recognition that the work has to be interesting – and that the audience needs to be entertained. The new CSF seems unafraid to ham it up a little. Good! Bring it. Theater/theatre can be fun.

IF YOU GO

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival presents "The Three Musketeers," adapted from the novel by Alexandre Dumas by Linda Alper, Douglas Langworthy and Penny Metropulos, at the Mary Rippon Theatre on the CU campus, through Aug. 13. For tickets and more information, please call the box office at 303-492-0554, or at www.coloradoshakes.org.