[In the following review, Lemon provides a favorable evaluation of Barry Edelstein's Williamstown Theater Festival rendering of As You Like It, singling out its jazzy, improvisational tone and Gwyneth Paltrow's accomplished Rosalind.]

As You Like It has been through so many permutations of race, class, and gender of late that it comes as something of a relief in Barry Edelstein's straightforward, slightly eccentric production to realise that directorial conceits will be kept to a minimum. The staging, which just completed a brief, hoopla-attended run in Massachusetts, offers only one unusual notion: jazz.

The Charlie Parker-meets-swingtime music, composed by Mark Bennett, is heard so often that it functions less as a score than as a soundtrack. At first, the music serves awkwardly to punch up emotions that would have better been left to the actors, and the sax-heavy melodies seem more appropriate to an early morning stroll in Manhattan than an evening frolic in a forest.

Slowly, however, you realise what the director is aiming for. Just as the play's heroine, Rosalind, must try on many selves until she finds the one most appealing to Orlando, so the music must assume many shapes to mirror its tentative lovers' moods. And no genre better suits such improvisations than jazz.

Yet the try-everything-on aspect of this production makes it slow to win us over. Rosalind, whose father has been banished from court, makes her entrance Alice-like through a trap door accompanied by her cousin Celia, whose father is now regnant. The women are attired in sweeping ball gowns, so nonchalant as they swan around that you almost believe that for rummaging through your attic no uniform, save satin, will suffice.

The dresses serve a purpose: they complement the backdrops dreamed up by the set designer, Narelle Sissons; they compliment their wearers, Gwyneth Paltrow and Megan Dodds. Paltrow, of course, is the prime attraction. Anyone searching for cracks in the actress's Elizabethan lacquer will be disappointed. As the smooth, sweet Rosalind and as the untutored, beardless Ganymede, the masculine identity she assumes after her banishment, Paltrow is all poise and playfulness. True, she occasionally forgets she is part of an ensemble, and inappropriately steals focus from her colleagues, but she knows how to tap the audience's huge reservoir of affection for her. The day may come when we wish that this high-bred, authentically elegant creature would find a real-life prince and retire to the Riviera, but that time is not yet upon us. Paltrow and Dodds, who is initially delightful but recedes from view too readily as the play proceeds, prance around the umber-smirched forest giggling like schoolgirls.

Against such high spirits, Orlando, played by Alessandro Nivola, cannot quite vie for adoration. Yet Nivola ensures that the giddiness does not get out of hand. By emphasising Orlando's “heart-heaviness” rather than his potential for happiness, the actor provides welcome ballast.

In a few years, one could easily imagine him playing opposite Paltrow's Blanche DuBois, although Paltrow would be hard-pressed to efface memories of Blythe Danner, her mother and Williamstown festival royalty, in the role.

With so many attractive young performers to look at, this production can be forgiven a few missed opportunities. Edelstein's staging, for example, tends to muffle the play's anarchic sense of sexual desire, its sense of comedy resulting from all loves apparently unrequited. The culmination of this theme, the moment when Rosalind and Orlando, and the rustic pair Silvius and Phoebe, each pines for loves lacking, was thrilling in the 1936 Olivier-Bergner movie; here, such elation is lacking.

But Edelstein, an intelligent, text-sensitive technician, may have meant to trump the youthful ardour by placing his most gifted actors in the part of Jaques and Touchstone. Jaques' melancholy, magnificently expressed by Michael Cumpsty, and Touchstone's nimble wit, impeccably conveyed by Mark Linn-Baker, combine for an emotional range against which coltish lovers, no matter how pretty, cannot be expected to compete.