As You Like It
Opening Night: June 5, 2012
Closing: June 30, 2012
Theater: Delacorte Theatre
Grammy and Emmy winning actor/comedian/musician and bestselling author Steve Martin will compose original music for As You Like It, Shakespeare’s most musical play, containing more songs than any other. Director Daniel Sullivan will set the play’s famous Forest of Arden in the rural American South, circa 1840, where folk and roots music perfectly capture the mood of the time.
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June 22, 2012
The Public Theater celebrates 50 years of Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater this summer. By all rights the city’s theater lovers should be showering the company with bouquets, and in a sense they do, day after day, summer after summer, snapping up the free tickets to this cherished New York institution whether the clouds threaten rain or the mosquitoes swarm. In grateful response the Public has given the city its own celebratory gift by mounting an absolutely smashing production of “As You Like It” that exemplifies the virtues of Shakespeare in the Park at its best — warmth, vigor, accessibility and lucidity — and also proves to be the funniest and most rewarding production of this rich, complicated comedy that I have yet seen.
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June 22, 2012
Can we just go ahead and sign up Daniel Sullivan for permanent Shakespeare in the Park duty? More than any of the repeat directors of this favorite summertime ritual of New York theater, Sullivan consistently gets it right. His Twelfth Night three years ago with Anne Hathaway was a ravishing evening, its tricky balance of playfulness, darkness and dizzying romance pulled off with impeccable finesse. The same goes for another popular comedy, As You Like It. Headlined by Lily Rabe, the expertly calibrated production serves as an exaltation of love and community that erases the divisions of the world for a magical three hours.
READ THE REVIEWJune 22, 2012
In a half-century of Shakespeare in the Park, it’s a Public Theater first. An "As You Like It" hoedown. While director Daniel Sullivan is, forsooth, complicit in this Shakespearean heehaw, we know who’s to blame. Check the program.
READ THE REVIEWJune 22, 2012
Shakespeare in the Park’s new “As You Like It” strikes stirring and memorable chords. And not just when it comes to the twangy bluegrass melodies by Steve Martin (yes, as in “The Jerk”) performed by a band throughout the song-infused play.
READ THE REVIEWJune 22, 2012
Fifty summers ago Joseph Papp directed George C. Scott and James Earl Jones in The Merchant of Venice in the new Delacorte Theater in Central Park as part of a Public Theater project to bring free Shakespeare to the masses. To celebrate the anniversary, Daniel Sullivan has staged a winning production of As You Like It, set in a banjo-strumming, antebellum South, and with a knockout performance by Lily Rabe as Rosalind.
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