Sand Harbor, Nev. ? The hail and lightening have stopped, and the trail of smoke is slowing from a small wildfire burning on the mountainside just above Lake Tahoe.

Kristie Connolly and Todd Kincaid are sitting on a sand dune with their legs propped up on a boulder in late July, sipping wine and nibbling on chunks of turkey while they wait for the 31st annual Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival to begin.

“It’s our first time,” said Connolly, who made the 45-minute drive from Reno up the Mount Rose Highway in a heavy thunderstorm to the natural amphitheater on the banks of Tahoe’s azure waters.

“It’s really awesome up here,” Kincaid said as he gazed across the Sierra lake at an elevation of 6,229 feet.

With Tahoe’s northeast shore averaging only 8 inches of rain a year, compared with 18 feet of snow, organizers boast that the annual summer performances have never been rained out. (The first formal rain-out came a few days later.)

But Darolyn Skelton, the festival’s executive director, seems a bit nervous on this night when numerous travel writers have been invited from out of town. She insists she’s not worried about the audience bailing out.

“Rain crowds are die-hards,” she said.

“But we’re having a power issue right now,” she confides 20 minutes before the 7:30 p.m. showtime for “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”

By 7:42 p.m., with no electricity in sight, festival board director Vicki McGowen announces that Act 1 will begin without lights or the sound system. “We have no power. However, in the 16th century, they had no power,” she shouts.

A few folks in the back grumble they can’t hear.

“I hope the actors have better projection than I do,” she said, then invites those concerned to take up some of the empty $65 seats down front in the outdoor theater that has a capacity of 1,000.

At 7:45 p.m., a champagne cork pops in the audience as the cast from the Foothill Theater Company of Nevada City, Calif., takes the stage in Civil War dress for this year’s rendition of the “Merry Wives,” set in postwar Windsor, N.C.

By 8:15 p.m., the lights are back on, and the microphones are again broadcasting the unusual concoction of Old English with a Southern drawl.

Darrow Brown didn’t have any trouble understanding it. A school teacher who lives in nearby Incline Village, she has become a regular since she moved to the area two years ago from Raleigh, N.C.

“The Shakespeare is more like a bonus. I don’t think that’s the focus. You bring a few bottles of wine and share the night with some friends overlooking the lake,” she said.