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Twelfth Night in Central Park
By Matt Wolf
22 Jun 2009
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Twelfth Night stars Raúl Esparza and Anne Hathaway
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| photo by Joan Marcus | What country, friends, is this? A land populated by Hathaway, Esparza, McDonald, Cumpsty, Sanders and more, all assembled by New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater.
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Twelfth Night imagines a setting called Illyria in which all things, or so it seems, are possible: mistaken identity and gender confusion, wind and rain alongside sunlight and romance, and an elaborate gag involving a pair of brightly colored stockings. Oh, and reconciliation and a kind of rebirth at the very end. What better site, then, for this perennially popular Shakespeare comedy than the Delacorte Theater outdoors in Central Park? Here is an actual theatrical space in which anything can happen, as well, in tandem with an audience that arrives not so much shipwrecked, Viola-style, as punchdrunk on the possibilities of Shakespeare on a summer night.
That "spirit of celebration," says Twelfth Night's director, Daniel Sullivan, typifies both Shakespeare in the Park itself and this particularly beloved play. "We've taken a little slice of the park and lifted it on to the stage of the Delacorte," Sullivan says of his designer John Lee Beatty's visualization of Shakespeare's text. "You never quite leave the park, I think, when you're coming to see this production."
And audiences are sure to attend, given a cast that is starry even by the standards of the Public Theater and this very play. Making her professional Shakespearean debut is 2009 Oscar nominee Anne Hathaway as Viola, the unwitting enchantress who has barely washed up on the shores of Illyria before she sends most of the community — not to mention herself — into an erotic tailspin. The cast includes numerous Public and/or Shakespeare in the Park regulars (Michael Cumpsty as the steward Malvolio, he of the unfortunate legwear; Jay O. Sanders as the ever-sodden Sir Toby Belch) and at least two performers who are known to many for their work in musicals: Raúl Esparza, who has four Tony Award nominations to his name, and Audra McDonald, who has four trophies and two further nominations.
McDonald has done Shakespeare before: the smallish role of Lady Percy in the much-laureled 2003 Lincoln Center production of Henry IV, starring Kevin Kline as Falstaff. Olivia in Twelfth Night is something else again: a countess first glimpsed in mourning following the deaths of her brother and father who finds herself bewitched by the male disguise Viola chooses for herself as the page, Cesario. Esparza, in turn, is making his Delacorte debut as the lovestruck Orsino, a suitor enraptured by his own poetic skills who starts the play with the famous appeal to the sounds of sustenance, "If music be the food of love, play on."
Oskar Eustis, artistic director of The Public, explains the high-level casting, which extends to Tony winner Julie White (The Little Dog Laughed) as the scheming Maria, one of the drunken Sir Toby's cohorts. "Once we had Anne, [the play] immediately became an actor-magnet," says Eustis. "It's also one of Shakespeare's great ensembles — a whole series of juicy, fantastic roles."
And although Hathaway has done stage musicals before, the intention here was to surround the "Rachel Getting Married" star and Shakespeare novice with a cast, notes Eustis, "stunning in its talent and also its solidity, if I can use that word. We've assembled a cast of the great New York stage actors of their generation. I feel like we're fielding a company as strong as any we've had in the park." Continued...
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