If, as the ‘60s song says, what the world needs now is love, sweet love, the Guthrie Theater is doing its best to unleash the flow.

Its new production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is an extraordinarily imaginative, disarmingly sincere and very funny love letter to love. Under the direction of the Guthrie’s artistic director, Joseph Haj, this marvelously executed production is full of color, movement and wonderfully realized comic characterizations.

While last spring’s internationally acclaimed “History Plays” trilogy may be the magnum opus of Haj’s directorial output since arriving in the big blue box by the river, I would argue that this “Midsummer Night’s Dream” stands out as the triumph of his 10-year tenure.

With “The History Plays,” Haj convinced a cast and creative team to join in common cause for what will likely be the most demanding project of their careers, and the discipline it required was palpable in the theater. But “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” presents the illusion of being an organic flowering of the ensemble’s conceptions of their characters, as if the ideas on display were all theirs, and that Haj’s role was to create a fusion of their visions and make sure it remains true to Shakespeare’s text.

That sense is present when Royer Bockus opens the show with ukelele in hand, singing a song about love and querying couples in the audience about the history of their partnerships. It sets the stage for the comedy to come in both its air of spontaneity and its musicality.

For Bockus and onstage composer/musician Jack Herrick have taken some of Shakespeare’s most musical verses and turned them into songs that periodically flare up in the show as if improvised on the spot, leaning into the sound of early-20th-century blues and jazz.

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a romantic comedy built on culture clash. Representing the aristocracy are two young lovers forbidden from coupling by her father and another who seeks her hand, but is being avidly pursued by her best friend. The commoners come courtesy of a theater troupe full of laborers rehearsing a play to be performed at a royal wedding. And then there are the fairies of the forest, whose king and queen are currently engaged in a spell-casting spat that wreaks havoc with the fortunes of the mortals when they wander into the woods.

Driving the comedy is the mischievous hobgoblin, Puck, and, if you liked Jimmy Kieffer’s portrayal of Falstaff in “The History Plays,” know that he’s basically taking him to Fairyland here in very funny fashion. But each of these three worlds has its own energetic ensemble.

Most impressive among them are the four young lovers whose affections go every which way while under magical influences. Your show-opening host, Bockus, becomes Helena, the dejected outsider of the romantic quadrangle. She’s outstanding, as is Ari Derambakhsh as Hermia, who transitions from sweetness to fury when she gets the idea that Helena is trying to steal her man, Jonathan Luke Stevens’ charming, guitar-strumming Lysander.

Completing the quartet is Justin Withers’ Demetrius, who unleashes his comic chops during a hilarious donnybrook. (Kudos to fight director Annie Enneking.) Equally uproarious are the members of the amateur theater troupe, spearheaded by Remy Auberjonois’ overly-sure-of-himself Bottom.

More than just a valentine to romance, this dream of a “Dream” succeeds thanks to a warm love for the art form of theater and an infectious feeling of delight.