The women negotiate the musical-theater style with more finesse, especially Blythe Wilson as a believably dim but lovable Miss Adelaide. And in smaller roles the advantages of the repertory system are evident in the quick, confident character choices made by actors who, on other days, are probably appearing in “H.M.S. Pinafore” and “Romeo and Juliet.” The repertory system doesn’t, however, account for the narrative verve and daring athleticism of the dancing, which Ms. Feore brings so far forward on the Festival Theater’s thrust stage that you expect to end up with a crapshooter in your lap.

That stage, part of Stratford’s original 1953 design, informs the feeling of many productions here, even those that take place in the three newer performance spaces the festival maintains in this charming city of 31,000. Sight lines (and the limited space for traps and flies) do not permit a great deal of scenery, so the sets are typically minimal and the costumes, in compensation, maximal. The unusual depth of the thrust also means that audience members, even those in the last row of the balcony of the 1,800-seat flagship theater, are never far from the action. This encourages an intimate acting style.

Both qualities are evident in the effervescent “Twelfth Night” (through Oct. 21), which in Martha Henry’s production feels personal but not maudlin. Shannon Taylor (also appearing in “School for Scandal”) beautifully traces the stages of Olivia’s recovery from grief; for once, you get the sense that her love for Viola (in disguise as Cesario) is drawing her back toward the sunlight in which she always belonged. The comedy and cruelties are nicely balanced, too, with an especially piquant contrast between Geraint Wyn Davies’s Sir Toby Belch — the best and funniest Shakespeare roué I’ve encountered — and the scarily dour Malvolio of Rod Beattie. But the star turn in this production comes from Brent Carver as the fool Feste, here a honey-voiced melancholic singing a suite of lovely songs (set by Reza Jacobs) while accompanying himself on glass bowls.

Music plays as large a role in Jillian Kelley’s production of the Euripides drama often known as “The Bacchae” but rendered here more Greekly as “Bakkhai.” Playing in the round at the festival’s Tom Patterson Theater through Sept. 23, this highly sexualized version, which required an “intimacy choreographer,” imagines the title characters as a throbbing coven of longhaired groupies, somewhere between an ambitious porno and a Summer’s Eve commercial. The 2015 adaptation by the poet Anne Carson also makes much of King Pentheus’s fetishy eagerness to spy on the women; when he applies lipstick as part of his disguise he does so like someone who has been longing for just this chance.