[In the following review of Barry Edelstein's 1999 production of As You Like It at the Williamstown Theatre, Brustein focuses on the success of acclaimed film actress Gwyneth Paltrow in the role of Rosalind.]

[In August, 1999], the Williamstown Theatre produced a version of As You Like It, staged by the new director of New York's Classic Stage Company, Barry Edelstein, and featuring Gwyneth Paltrow as Rosalind. I went for the same reason everybody else did, to see whether Paltrow could handle a major Shakespearean role.

Paltrow did not disappoint my expectations, though the production did a little. Having played both Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare in Love, and having been shipwrecked on a strand at the end of that movie, presumably in preparation for playing Viola, she performed Shakespeare's other major trouser-role at Williamstown with the same authority, grace, and luminosity she displayed in the film. Paltrow's Rosalind first appears at court in a strapless red gown at the side of her friend Celia (played charmingly by Megan Dodds) who is costumed in green. Paltrow may be ravishing in a dress, but she is even more appealing in pants. Instead of bedecking her uncommon fine-boned beauty with a mustache and goatee, as she did in Shakespeare in Love, Paltrow plays the trousers part as an ungainly youth in knickers and spectacles, his peaked cap worn backward on the head, like an aw-shucks version of Huckleberry Finn or Penrod. Occasionally she gets a little shrill, as if she hasn't quite measured properly the dimensions of the theater. But when she lowers her voice to that of an adolescent boy, she finds the perfect pitch of the part.

Paltrow makes her instruction of Orlando in the arts of love an act of sheer bravado. When he offers to leave her side for two hours, she demonstrates a capacity for heartbreak. Although Paltrow has the chops to show how many fathoms deep she is in love, she is no suffering Juliet. She can modify her feeling for Orlando with a charming skepticism about the relationship between passion and survival. (“Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”)

Only Mark Linn-Baker, playing Touchstone, is her equal in the cast. Dreadfully costumed as a 1940s pimp, he has the good sense to underplay his part when all around are overplaying theirs. He has a comic interlude with a model of a sheep on wheels that is sheer Chaplin, though he is required to repeat the gag at least two more times. And he is the only one in the cast capable of singing, rather than belting out, the Shakespearean songs. The others tend to treat them like nightclub showstoppers or cabaret numbers.

A jazz band sits on stage to help punch out the musical accompaniment. It's a good band, thoroughly out of place in the Forest of Arden. So is the setting, which makes this sylvan paradise look more like an overdecorated bordello. And since the good Duke, played by Byron Jennings (who plays the bad duke as well) is stylishly dressed in riding boots and jodhpurs, we get little sense that he and his court are in exile, eking out a precarious existence with limited resources.

Edelstein is badly served by his designers, and he has made some odd casting choices as well. Michael Cumpsty is an accomplished classical actor, but to play Jacques like a swashbuckling soldier is to ignore the central quality of the character, which is his jaundiced disposition. Likewise, the various female rustics perform as if they've just emerged from the dressing room of a Broadway musical or a downtown discotheque. Shaw once observed that the title of As You Like It was Shakespeare's way of admitting that he had sold out to the audience, and much of this production seems designed to confirm that insight. But Gwyneth Paltrow is the real crowd-pleaser—not because she tries to perform Shakespeare without tears, but because she has the ability to play her role with humor, imagination, and a refreshing devotion to authorial intention.