SOURCE: Brantley, Ben. Review of As You Like It. New York Times (9 August 1999): E1, E3.

[In the following review of director Barry Edelstein's 1999 production of As You Like It at the Williamstown Theater Festival, Brantley highlights the centrality of film star Gwyneth Paltrow's excellent performance as Rosalind in this otherwise “burlesque” staging of the drama.]

For a moment it looks like Oscar night all over again. There she is in a Grace Kelly ball gown, as pale and luminous as a moonbeam. Yes, it's unmistakably the same swan-necked Gwyneth Paltrow who accepted the Academy Award for best actress for Shakespeare in Love earlier this year. Yet there's something not quite right about the picture.

That dress for example: it fits perfectly, but it seems to be wearing her, as the saying goes, rather than vice versa. Ms. Paltrow curiously appears less at home in such attire than the person with whom she is sharing the stage at the moment, another ice-blonde actress named Megan Dodds. What is it that's making Ms. Paltrow so self-conscious? Just opening-night jitters?

Actually, the awkwardness is as deliberate a choice as her tightly pulled-back hair. Portraying Rosalind in the Williamstown Theater Festival's jaunty and bumpy new production of As You Like It, directed by Barry Edelstein, Ms. Paltrow turns her entrance into a witty comment on her image as an elegant clothes hanger, while reminding us that there is a sharp and playful intelligence beneath the gloss.

The Rosalind who climbs onto the stage through a trap door, revealing plenty of the well-turned leg beneath her long skirt, is both spirited and uncertain, a colt still waiting to grow out of awkwardness. But just watch how her confidence blossoms once she changes into something more comfortable. In this case it clearly takes some time in men's clothing to make a woman out of a girl.

Let's all heave a sigh of relief. Returning to the theater where she cut her teeth as a performer and where her mother, Blythe Danner, has long reigned as a favorite actress, Ms. Paltrow winningly claims for herself a role stamped by interpreters from Lillie Langtry to Vanessa Redgrave. Granted, she has already proved she is quite capable of bringing flair to Elizabethan-style speech and courtship by cross-dressing in Shakespeare in Love.

But Ms. Paltrow isn't recycling cinematic tricks. Her take on Rosalind has a boldness and broadness, a way of suggesting spontaneity in stylized terms, that could work only in the theater. If there is occasionally a curl of affectation in her line readings, you never doubt that Ms. Paltrow knows exactly what she is saying and why she is saying it. It is a thought-through performance that refuses to coast on charm and is poised between delicate moments of insight and comic exaggeration.

The same cannot always be said of Mr. Edelstein's production, which deliberately emphasizes the artificial nature of Shakespeare's great pastoral comedy. The evening's themes and its blend of merriment and melancholy are established with precision and inventiveness in its opening scenes.

But as the production continues, its controlled balance is tipped toward a looser, anything-goes burlesque, typical of summertime Shakespeare but less than worthy of the higher ambitions in evidence here.

The show doesn't drag. But it needs to whittle down its farcical elements to set off properly not only Ms. Paltrow's fully integrated performance, but also that of Mark Linn-Baker, as the play's verbally dextrous clown, and of Michael Cumpsty, who gives an intriguing new edge to the sardonic and brooding Jaques.

Mr. Edelstein's central conceit is a good one. The production—which makes prominent use of original music by Mark Bennett, suavely rendered by a four-piece band and the singer-actor Keith Byron Kirk—uses jazz to reflect the play's sense of creative improvisation in life. All the characters in As You Like It are, in a sense, trying to figure out just what they do like, what tones and rhythms suit their specific selves. The final sorting out of lovers, orchestrated by Rosalind and providence, is a progression into sweet harmony after a series of experimental riffs.

Accordingly, when we first meet Rosalind and Celia (Ms. Dodds), her cousin and the daughter of the Duke who ousted Rosalind's father (Byron Jennings takes on both roles with gusto), they are playing dress-up, trying on different attitudes with props pulled from a trunk. It is Celia, played with appealing, waspish wryness by Ms. Dodds, who takes the initiative and shows the greater elan here.

Ms. Paltrow's Rosalind, more than any I've seen, is all too aware of her position as a barely tolerated outsider in her uncle's court, and this insecurity heightens her callowness. When she first spots Orlando (Alessandro Nivola), who comes to challenge the usurping duke's favorite wrestler (an amusingly gangsterish Mark K. Smaltz), her response is as goony as that of a lovesick teen-ager.

Only when the game of dress-up begins in earnest, when Rosalind flees from her uncle's court to the forest of Arden disguised as a boy, does she begin seriously to sort out who she is. Arden is where her exiled father dwells; it is also where Orlando, dispossessed by his vengeful brother (Stephen Barker Turner), seeks asylum.

In the celebrated scenes in which Rosalind, as the boy Ganymede, tutors the unwitting Orlando in the aspects of love, Ms. Paltrow makes it clear that she is giving herself an education as well. The deception forces this Rosalind to temper and channel the rushing current of previously unknown passions, and Ms. Paltrow does some lovely things with tempo and inflection to chart her character's evolution.

One wishes that the Orlando here were more up to the challenge his Rosalind presents. Mr. Nivola, an actor of chiseled handsomeness and willowy build, is delightful when he is simply reacting, whether in wonder, bewilderment or enthusiasm. But he is less at home with the language than Ms. Paltrow is.

As the mock-classical, rustic lovers of pastoral idylls, Silvius and Phoebe, John Ellison Conlee and Angelina Phillips are straight out of Dogpatch, as is the lusty goatherd, Audrey, as embodied by the ever vivid Lea DeLaria. They are all funny at moments, but often in pandering ways that need to be reined in.

As Audrey's suitor and the resident philosopher-clown, Touchstone, Mr. Linn-Baker, best known for the television series Perfect Strangers, has an assured, ebullient delivery that does indeed become the touchstone of the play's love of language. And Mr. Cumpsty is a fascinating Jaques, a reformed libertine who has still to come to terms with his own erotic impulses.

Mr. Cumpsty sounds the evening's most insistent notes of darkness with style and wit, and it's a shame that by the production's end it has no place for the subtleties of his performance. Even Narelle Sissons's setting, which begins as an elegant study in surrealism and makes droll use of blatantly fake livestock, seems to become garish and overblown.

So does the music, which turns Hymen's ode to marriage into the schmaltzy standard “What a Wonderful World,” sung (nicely enough) by Larry Marshall as Orlando's trusty old retainer, here bizarrely transformed into a Cab Calloway figure.

None of this, however, eclipses the genuine grace of Ms. Paltrow's final metamorphosis, when Rosalind returns undisguised for the wedding scene. In a simple, fluid white dress (the good-looking costumes are by Anita Yavich) that is eons away from the stiff ball gown of her opening scene, this Rosalind has a new composure combined with the vulnerable air of someone who has emerged from protective disguise to face the world as herself.

Ms. Paltrow, too, has undergone transformations since she last appeared in Williamstown, as Nina in The Seagull five years ago. At that time she had the shimmering presence that would translate so beguilingly to film but little of the necessary assurance for a complicated part. This actress's growth into maturity becomes an enchanted mirror in As You Like It for that of the character she plays.