Anne Hathaway & Audra McDonald / Photo by Joan Marcus
It turns out The Princess Diaries may not be such horrible preparation for Shakespeare. Anne Hathaway, starring in the Shakespeare in the Park rendition of Twelfth Night (Anne Hathaway was also the name of Shakespeare’s wife, for those interested in cosmic coincidences), was the show’s biggest draw—and greatest potential liability, but she gives an impressive performance as Viola, a shipwrecked aristocrat posing as a male servant.
Twelfth Night is a typical Shakespearean comedy of star-crossed but flippant romances resolved in marriage and goodwill. The comically convoluted plot is too complex to detail to here. Suffice it to say a lot of characters start with gross misperceptions of each other and love people that they shouldn’t.
It is one of those misperceptions that allows Hathaway to succeed. Spending almost the entire play as a man, she is forced to explore acting territory completely foreign from her mainstream Hollywood work. The importance of this division between screen and stage is evident in her first scene, when she is still a woman. Here, the acting is a bit histrionic, but her character becomes more natural in menswear. The rest of the cast is a solid assemblage of stage actors who all hold their own on the grassy stage, which looks like a snippet of mowed Irish plain.
The stage, the costumes and, most of all, the music all fit the show’s loose Celtic aesthetic, which dovetails with the play. It’s difficult to overemphasize the importance of first lines in Shakespeare, and so it is good that this production takes the opening—“If music be the food of love, play on”—and runs with it. This Twelfth Night features enough singing, as well as a nearly constant present troupe of instrument-wielding minstrels, to qualify as a musical, and the music always compliments the moment. Whether its flighty jigs for scenes of revelry or somber elegies for mediations on life and loss, the soundtrack is well chosen.
The production’s one sticking point has more to do with what the Public Theater claims as its goal than with the play itself: Twelfth Night was chosen for its bubbly joy, an antidote to “the shocks” the City has endured this past year, as the program puts it. But this play is one with hanging notes of bitterness—the ominous departure of Malvolio, the unpunished defrauding of Andrew Aguecheek, the recent deaths of two fathers and a brother. If the goal of this production is unstinting joy, there are more upbeat Shakespearean comedies to choose.
But that is a minor quibble. As long as rainclouds of this soggy June abate, Twelfth Night should be welcome to play on.
Twelfth Night is a typical Shakespearean comedy of star-crossed but flippant romances resolved in marriage and goodwill. The comically convoluted plot is too complex to detail to here. Suffice it to say a lot of characters start with gross misperceptions of each other and love people that they shouldn’t.
It is one of those misperceptions that allows Hathaway to succeed. Spending almost the entire play as a man, she is forced to explore acting territory completely foreign from her mainstream Hollywood work. The importance of this division between screen and stage is evident in her first scene, when she is still a woman. Here, the acting is a bit histrionic, but her character becomes more natural in menswear. The rest of the cast is a solid assemblage of stage actors who all hold their own on the grassy stage, which looks like a snippet of mowed Irish plain.
The stage, the costumes and, most of all, the music all fit the show’s loose Celtic aesthetic, which dovetails with the play. It’s difficult to overemphasize the importance of first lines in Shakespeare, and so it is good that this production takes the opening—“If music be the food of love, play on”—and runs with it. This Twelfth Night features enough singing, as well as a nearly constant present troupe of instrument-wielding minstrels, to qualify as a musical, and the music always compliments the moment. Whether its flighty jigs for scenes of revelry or somber elegies for mediations on life and loss, the soundtrack is well chosen.
The production’s one sticking point has more to do with what the Public Theater claims as its goal than with the play itself: Twelfth Night was chosen for its bubbly joy, an antidote to “the shocks” the City has endured this past year, as the program puts it. But this play is one with hanging notes of bitterness—the ominous departure of Malvolio, the unpunished defrauding of Andrew Aguecheek, the recent deaths of two fathers and a brother. If the goal of this production is unstinting joy, there are more upbeat Shakespearean comedies to choose.
But that is a minor quibble. As long as rainclouds of this soggy June abate, Twelfth Night should be welcome to play on.
