It's Shakespeare in Drag, rather than in Love, in a colorful period piece originally penned -- or perhaps quilled -- by Jeffrey Hatcher for the stage. The successful premiere of Hatcher's "Compleat Female Stage Beauty" by Pittsburgh's City Theatre paved the way for its journey to the screen with a streamlined story and title.

		'Stage Beauty' Rating: R for sexual content and language. Starring: Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Rupert Everett. Director: Richard Eyre.

"Stage Beauty," in the eye of post-Elizabethan beholders, was epitomized by Ned Kynaston (1640-1706), last and best of the celebrated "boy actresses" who played the Bard's great female roles in an age when women were forbidden to appear on stage. After King Charles I's head rolled and Oliver Cromwell's Puritans took over, stage productions were almost entirely suppressed.

The Restoration brought Charles II and his French-induced love of theater back to London, whose darling Kynaston (Billy Crudup) would become. Don't let the onstage female impersonation fool you: Ned has a healthy heterosexual hankering for Maria (Claire Danes), his adoring dresser, plus a legion of 17th-century groupies to rival Johnny Depp's.

Well, maybe he's playing on both teams, considering his intimacies with the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Chaplin) and his cross-dressed teasing of foppish Sir Charles Sedley (Richard Griffiths). But the times, in any case, are a-changin': Charles II (Rupert Everett) thinks "Othello" might be cheerier with some jokes -- and the stage, in general, with some women on it.

Watching Ned nightly from the wings, Maria has memorized his every Shakespearian line and is secretly appearing as Desdemona in an "underground" tavern production. Meanwhile, the king's favorite mistress, Nell Gwynn (Zoe Tapper), is likewise stagestruck and pushing His Maj to lift the ban on gals. Ned's public and private life can't help but decline in proportion to the ladies' rise.

"Stage Beauty" (with a cast of dozens, rather than thousands) is more superficial and far less witty or spectacularly atmospheric than "Shakespeare in Love." But it is roundly as well as Roundheadedly entertaining. We and screenplaywright Hatcher have Samuel Pepys' famous diaries to confirm some -- if hardly all -- of these characters and bawdy goings-on. Their sexual ambiguities are sensationalized to the max, and you never thought mandolin music could be "raucous" until you've heard this score.

Crudup gallops through the tale with charm and aplomb, but his weakness, ironically, lies in the fact that he's not very vocally or physically convincing as a woman. Where was Charles Busch when they needed (and should have casted) him? Danes, on the other hand, manages to be almost as believable as she is beautiful.

"Stage Beauty," in the end, is over the top, bordering on burlesque. (Those male beauty marks are beyond even Ken Russell.) And its final hetero-resolution of Ned's personal/professional angst will invite hoots from gay viewers.

But it has some memorable lines, my favorite being: "A woman playing a woman? It's preposterous!"