Earlier this year, Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival producer Kermit Christman announced plans to present Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not For Burning at its outdoor amphitheater home in Jupiter this summer. But such pronouncements are always subject to change and, sure enough, the quirky classical company has revised its thinking on the matter.

Instead of the verse play from 1948, the Festival is going to its namesake playwright and his popular comedy, Twelfth Night, marking the third time the troupe has mounted the work in its 22-year history.

In guest artist director Kevin Crawford’s program note, he calls Twelfth Night “our play of demarcation.” The Festival inaugurated its Shakespeare-by-the-Sea series with it in 1990, and produced it again in 1996 as the company opened its amphitheater’s second phase, with new bowl-shaped landscaping, bathrooms and upgraded electric power.

This latest version, running in Carlin Park’s Seabreeze Amphitheatre through July 22, marks the end of an era. The county’s Parks & Recreations Department has encouraged the company to produce two plays in rotating repertory, beginning in Summer 2013. So Crawford selected Twelfth Night to be the Festival’s last stand-alone outdoor show.

This farcical tale of separated twins, mistaken identity and gender confusion begins with a shipwreck. But in true Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival revisionist style, its Twelfth Night opens instead with an airplane crash. That is bound to have audiences thinking of the TV series Lost, but Crawford insists that was never on his mind.

“I’ve never seen Lost,” says the assistant professor of English and Theatre at Georgia’s Reinhardt University. “Certainly that show doesn’t have a monopoly on crashes on an island. In the back of my head, I was probably picturing childhood reading like Robinson Crusoe, then just translated it a little further into the future.”

The cast wears contemporary costumes, but otherwise Crawford says the production is pure Shakespeare. “Once the airplane crashes, we simply do the play,” he notes. ‘Once it starts, it’s Twelfth Night.”

Besides directing, Crawford plays Malvolio, a humorless egotist who gets his comeuppance. “He’s a self-proclaimed Puritan, a stuffed shirt. A British comedian once described him as the kind of guy who would stand up in a strip club and say, ‘When are the jugglers coming on?’ ”

Still, Crawford considers the character the most interesting acting opportunity in the play. “Malvolio has long been on my bucket list.”

“Try to Remember” the longevity champ . . . Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s allegorical musical The Fantasticks premiered in 1960, as the off-Broadway movement was gaining momentum, and it played in one small theater for 42 years — the longest continuous run on the planet.

“It is truly one of the great classics of the stage,” says J. Barry Lewis, who is directing the show at Palm Beach Dramaworks, opening tonight.

The company was looking for something lighter than its usual fare for the summer, but Lewis feels the show, based on Edmond Rostand’s Les Romanesques, is hardly fluff. “I find that the play is an extraordinary look at romance and naivete, but it has a very dark side to it. And that darkness is what makes it work.

“Harvey Schmidt says the show works best when it juxtaposes the light with the dark, the laugh and the cry, right next to each other like a chord of music. That’s an extraordinarily tricky thing to pull off,” Lewis concedes. “We’ll see if we succeed.”

The story concerns two neighboring fathers, who invent a feud and forbid their son and daughter to fall in love, knowing that such a ban will have the opposite effect.

The original off-Broadway production was physically very sparse, which Lewis sees as the key to the show’s succeed. “My concept of what works for this show is simplicity. In its simplicity, it is one of the most complex musicals we have,” he explains. “Capturing that simplicity is very hard. The way it draws on the audience’s imagination, to me is theater at its best.”

Since 1960, The Fantasticks has been performed in an estimated 67 different countries, a testament to its universal themes. “It’s about growing up, it’s about taking responsibility, about understanding the world,” says Lewis. “And it is also highly entertaining.”