Looking back at recent productions, I am struck by the strength — and often the prescience — in the casting. When a movie star had one of the two big female roles, bets were usually hedged with a real stage professional in the other part. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio was a radiant Viola to Pfeiffer’s Olivia. Kyra Sedgwick played Olivia to Hunt’s Viola. And look at this: Oliver Platt was madly lovely as Sir Toby Belch in the Smits/Stiles production, with Christopher Lloyd as a terrific Malvolio, and Kristen Johnston and Zach Braff in smaller comic roles.

Look for Hathaway also to be surrounded by formidable theater actors, including Audra McDonald as Olivia and Raul Esparza as Orsino. In 2006, Hathaway said she was more comfortable onstage than in movies. “I trained to be a theater actress,” she said. “Put me in front of a camera and I’m like ’duh.’ But put me on a stage in front of 2,000 people, I know what I’m doing.” So we’ll see.

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WHEN&WHERE
Shakespeare in the Park’s “Twelfth Night” starring Anne Hathaway, at the Delacorte Theater, Central Park near West 81st Street, in previews for a June 25 opening, through July 12. Tickets are free on the day of performance, two per person, after 1 p.m. in

Anne Hathaway is both theater nerd and Hollywood starlet, do-gooder and glamour-seeker. And this summer, in Central Park, she is also both boy and girl.

You must excuse me,” says Anne Hathaway, at Cafe Luxembourg on the Upper West Side. The 26-year-old actress is explaining that she’s very, very tired, because she is playing Viola in Twelfth Night, this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park offering, and she has been rehearsing like mad. She’s trying to say the play is complicated, but deceptively so, or maybe it’s deceptively simple? “My mind is shot,” she says, dumping a bit of milk into her coffee. She doesn’t look tired: Her skin is porcelain clear, her eyes calm and bright. “I can speak only in iambic pentameter.”

Anne Hathaway is a theater geek: She enunciates her words very clearly and speaks with an actressy almost-accent, like Rosalind Russell. She has a big, toothy, Julia Roberts–esque laugh. Some words she sings out, mock-opera style: “Great minds!” she trills when we both order the same thing for lunch.

Had Hathaway been born with a less beautiful face, or with less talent, you get the feeling she would’ve stuck to the theater anyhow, as a stagehand or a grip, or a longtime counselor at Stagedoor Manor camp. “I wake up in the morning,” she says, “and the first breath I take is in the devotion of acting.” But she is beautiful—her features out-proportion the rest of her face by a mile—and, as became particularly clear in last year’s Rachel Getting Married, in which she played a recovering drug addict, she’s really very good. “I saw her in The Princess Diaries at a drive-in movie theater in Maine,” says Rachel director Jonathan Demme, “and I just thought, What a great presence. It kind of made me proud to be an American, seeing her share the screen with Julie Andrews. She’s got quote-unquote It.” Continue reading