Kevin Kline and Meryl Streep (Getty Images)

In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park festival at the Delacorte Theater, Kevin Kline and Meryl Streep are going to play parts we would have thought they might have aged out of--Romeo and Juliet. Hey, if there's anyone whom we're told, over and over, can play any role, it's Ms. Streep! The pair, who made (the somehow underrated!) Sophie's Choice and the recent Prairie Home Companion together, are to be joined by the likes of Raul Esparza, Jesse L. Martin, Sam Waterston, and Christopher Walken onstage. Eighties-movies junkies--or those who want to see Meryl Streep surmount the ultimate acting challenge--will have to be rather lucky to get a seat; the performance is for one night only on June 18. (Tickets start at $1,500!)

Tonya Pinkins and Carson Elrod in Measure for Measure.

New Yorkers are a cynical and individualistic bunch, reluctant to parrot slogans and loathe to do anything en masse. But if ever we were to reveal our inner romantic jingoists, we would do so by proclaiming Milton Glaser’s straightforward dictum of urban pride, and we would do it not separately, but together, contentedly nestled in the Delacorte Theater at the western edge of Central Park, the Beresford triple-towering behind us, talented actors reciting Shakespeare’s poetry on the big stage in front of us, trees in the distance tousled by the breeze and stars—actual, visible, celestial stars—twinkling overhead. I love New York, one of the 1,800 happy theatergoers would rise to say. I love New York, another would echo. More would repeat, until the crowd’s declarations reached a great crescendo. At Shakespeare in the Park—more than almost anywhere else in the city; more than ever, in Mr. Glaser’s 2001 tweak—it is impossible not to love New York.

There’s plenty of Shakespeare around, of course, and there are other annual outdoor Shakespeare festivals. (To name just two: Shakespeare in the Parking Lot is a subway ride south, and Shakespeare on the Sound is a quick drive up the Hutch.) But where else could you find a fully outfitted open-air theater in a great urban park? Where else could you get Equity casts and Broadway directors and top-tier design and production? Only in New York, kids, and that’s part of what makes a night at the Delacorte so magical.

What’s interesting, then, is how differently the two directors of this year’s Shakespeare in the Park productions—All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure opened last week and are being performed in repertory, as The Merchant of Venice and The Winter’s Tale were last year—have treated the theater in which they’re working and that is so integral a part of the theatergoer’s experience.

Daniel Sullivan, whose insightful and compassionate interpretation of Merchant last summer delivered Al Pacino to Broadway and made Lily Rabe a star, this year directs All’s Well That Ends Well in a staging that both embraces and takes it tone from its surroundings. The Delacorte stage is left open to the lighted foliage behind it, and the whole enterprise feels light and open. The play, sometimes described as a fairy tale, is presented as a lark, an entertainment for a summer night. It is a delight.

David Esbjornson, on the other hand, directs a Measure for Measure that rejects its environment. The production is dark, heavy. Where All’s Well, set in what appears to be the Edwardian period, uses as its one set piece a delicate, filigreed, double-height loggia spanning the stage, that same element in Measure is instead clad in blocky, black-painted wood, a hulking monolith that gives the stage a dark, medieval cast. (These simple, effective and versatile sets are by Scott Pask; Peter Kaczorowski did the lovely lighting design.) The trees behind the stage are kept dark for Measure, and when a breeze blows across the stage, mussing the costumes, it seems ominous. While Mr. Sullivan’s All’s Well plays for laughs, Mr. Esbjornson’s Measure is a morality fable. It is a gloomy production, and it is a gloomy evening.

Otherwise, much about these two offerings is similar.

Both All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure are believed to have been written around 1604, both concern goings-on at court—the King of France’s in All’s Well, the Duke of Vienna’s in Measure—and both are driven by powerful, wronged, young women.

In All’s Well, Helena, the orphaned daughter of a great doctor, saves the king’s life and as her reward is wed to Bertram, a count, who runs off to war rather than consummate marriage to a woman he believes his inferior. In Measure, Angelo, the staunch moralist ruling Vienna in the duke’s absence, orders Claudio beheaded for the crime of impregnating his fiancée. The novice Isabella, Claudio’s sister, pleads to Angelo for leniency and is propositioned: If she will sleep with the heretofore upstanding ruler, he will free her brother.

Both figure among Shakespeare’s so-called “problem plays,” in that they are classifiable as neither comedies nor tragedies, but also in that they don’t entirely make sense. (This is more true of All’s Well, which provides no reason why strong, capable Helena would remain in thrall to a self-absorbed ass like Bertram, or why their final-scene reconciliation should be thought a happy ending, other than that it plainly is one.)

Both plots also turn on a “bed trick,” which is the Shakespeare-studies term for the plot device in which a woman agrees to go to bed with a man but then arranges for a different woman to be waiting in the darkened bedroom. (When a pair of male twins pulled a bed trick on one brother’s girlfriend in what I recall as a Law & Order episode, it was called “rape,” which lacks the same terminological playfulness.)

Beyond thematic similarities, the plays also share stellar performances by the company’s actors.

Mr. Sullivan works the same magic with his Helena in All’s Well, Annie Parisse, that he did last summer with Ms. Rabe in Merchant: determined, sensitive and powerful, Ms. Parisse (who played in two of my favorite off-Broadway plays of the past two seasons, Becky Shaw and Clybourne Park) is a joy to watch, a star. The Isabella in Mr. Esbjornson’s Measure is the stunning Danai Gurira, Zimbabwean by way of Iowa, who is as captivating as Ms. Parisse and plays the role exuding the moving certitude of the religious and the good.

Other deeply pleasurable performances come from the accomplished veteran John Cullum, who is 81 years old and owns the stage as All’s Well’s King of France (and owns it less as Measure’s Escalus only because the part is smaller); the estimable Tonya Pinkins, delightful as both a regal countess in All’s Well and a bawdy madam in Measure; and the expert Shakespearian Dakin Matthews, who shows a blend of steel and compassion as both a wise old lord in All’s Well and the jailer in Measure.

The only performer who doesn’t meet this standard is Reg Rogers, who is smarmy and grating in more than just the intended ways as comic-relief characters in both plays. (He plays both as extended riffs on Monty Python’s “I fart in your general direction” French soldier.) But that is a small detail. All’s Well is wonderful, Measure is somewhat less so, and both provide a fine chance to spend an evening at the loveliest place in New York.

editorial@observer.com

This year's production cast Al Pacino as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. The last time the play was produced by the public theater was in 1962 with George C. Scott as Shylock and a looming but finally unrealized threat of picketing for anti-Semitism from the New York Board of Rabbis.

"This play is very timely in that it reminds us that credit default swaps have always sucked," NYC Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kate Levin quipped to the audience on behalf of Mayor Bloomberg.

A cluster of circular party tables clothed in key-lime-green tablecloths hosted a variety of theater supporters grouped by benefactor. At Nora Ephron's table, Bette Midler, Joel Klein and Bob Balaban gossiped across trays of macaroons, Ms. Midler whooping upon the announcement that $1.4 million had been raised at the event.

At a neighboring table, Naomi Watts and husband Liev Schreiber were swapping sweet nothings. Mr. Schreiber, who is on the board of the Public Theater, later told the Transom what he thought of Merchant's anti-Semitism,

"I think that's what makes it so good. That's what makes him so brilliant as a writer, that duality. There was not a more anti-Semitic place, really, in the world, outside of 1940s Berlin, than Elizabethan England. They were extremely anti-Semitic, yet this writer still felt compelled to write a soliloquy like 'hath not a Jew eyes, feelings, senses, emotions.'

"I think that's what makes this play so remarkable. Because you somehow can't blame Shylock. At the end of the day, you come away from this play thinking, 'Poor Shylock,' which is a remarkable thing for a writer in Elizabethan England to do."

Journalist and CNN pundit Fareed Zakaria was elegantly shoveling salmon into his mouth while listening to Sam Waterston's introduction of the evening's honoree, Lincoln Center and Public Theater maven Bernard Gersten.

Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly arrived late, two pairs of glasses suspended around his neck, a third pair perched on his nose (none of them sunglasses). "I love Twelfth Night and I love Much Ado About Nothing," said Nora Ephron, queen of the contemporary rom-com. "I'm into the comedies, and short! I'm a fan of all the short plays!"

Glee star Jonathan Groff, with cherubic, face-framing curls and James Dean dark wash jeans, was accosted by so many young female fans that many mistook him for a Twilight cast member. NBC anchor Dan Abrams set the record straight, "No, it can't be Twilight. If he was in Twilight, he would have serious security; that thing is out of control."

Early in Act I, Mr. Pacino declined a dinner invitation with the Christians, "to smell pork!?" He wrinkled his nose. Nervous laughter skittered across the audience. In the row to the Transom's right sat a Bernstein, a Lebow and a Rubin.

"Selling tickets that are meant to be free deprives New Yorkers of enjoying the benefits that this taxpayer-supported institution provides," Cuomo told the Daily News. In the past scalpers have charged between $80 and $150 dollars for their services, a veritable pound of flesh. 

As this 2008 Times article details, past efforts to stop "Craig's List" sitters came from the Public Theater and haven't been remarkably effective. Their methods rellied on remembering repeat offenders' faces in a crowd of 1,800. Halting the craigslist postings at the source offers at least a revived hope for shorter lines.

Cuomo's crackdown comes just in time, as Al Pacino—who has been stalking Jews to research his Shylock—is sure to draw a crowd. My kingdom for a lawn chair!

If city budget planners have their way, there will be less Shakespeare in the Park, shortened museum hours and thousands of layoffs throughout the city.

It is all part of a potentially damaging-and ill-advised-attack on the New York art scene that could leave arts in the city with $30 million less in funding at a time when private donations are drying up.

The New York Observer today begins a campaign to reverse those cuts, or at least lessen their severity.

The central point: Arts institutions are far more than luxuries, particularly in a bad economy. They provide informal day care for families, entertainment for teens and cheap weekends for budget-strapped families.

Yet as part of a broader round of cuts in response to a city deficit, Mayor Michael Bloomberg last month announced a 31 percent funding cut for the city's arts organizations-which comes on top of a 40 percent state cut to the New York Council on the Arts.

"These cuts are too much and too deep," says Norma Munn, chairwoman of the New York City Arts Coalition. "There will not be recovery for a significant amount of art groups."

In past cutbacks, many arts institutions were able to turn to individual and corporate benefactors to make up the difference. Now that safety net is no longer there.

"This is what I would call a perfect storm," says Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum and chair of the Cultural Institutions Group, which is composed of 33 of the city's major cultural institutions.  "Everybody is facing financial difficulties. Corporate giving is way, way, way down. Individual giving is down. Foundation giving is more turned toward social services. So there's no way to make it up. The waves are coming from all directions."

Collectively, CIG member organizations employ 9,000 New Yorkers from every borough and from every segment of the community.

According to the NYCAC, there are approximately 200,000 jobs generated by cultural institutions in the state-positions that could now be imperiled, further jeopardizing a New York unemployment rate that still hovers around 9.8 percent.

While it's difficult to determine the exact number of layoffs that could stem from the budget cuts, since arts groups employ many part-time and temporary workers, Ms. Munn estimates 1,500 to 1,600 jobs in small and midsize arts groups will be eliminated if the budget is approved.

Mr. Lehman added that when the organization faced a $18 million budget cut in 2009, 417 employees were laid off and 459 were furloughed. Now, with a possible $30 million cut, 695 jobs could be lost and 765 employees furloughed.

"I think sometimes there's not a realization that cultural [organizations] are generating money," says Andrew Hamingson, executive director of the Public Theater, which produces Shakespeare in the Park. "For every one dollar, we generate eight."

Those dollars are returned to the city in the form of restaurant spending, taxicabs, T-shirt sales and  neighborhood vendors. "I think that's why it's extremely shortsighted," Mr. Hamingson said. "It's not just cutting $20 million. Twenty million times eight is what you're risking."

In response to the $29 million in proposed cuts, cultural leaders are pushing for a restoration of $20 million-less than 1 percent of the city's overall budget. Arts leaders aren't arguing that they should be immune from the kind of cuts everyone is facing; they're simply arguing that their cuts shouldn't be so extreme.

Earlier this week, Mr. Lehman testified before the City Council to urge for the $20 million restoration; Ms. Munn, meanwhile, is spearheading an email campaign to leaders in Albany, hoping to stop the state cuts before they happen.

As part of its campaign, The Observer is running public-service advertisements urging a restoration of the cuts, and sponsoring billboard ads, from Fuel Outdoor, that highlight the arts' economic impact in New York.

"In 23 years, I've never seen a state agency taking a 40 percent cut," Ms. Munn said. "I find it astonishing that Governor Paterson seems to think it's O.K."

Many small and midsize art groups simply may not survive the cuts. The number of free cultural programs, performances and events will severely decline.

But the biggest hit of all may be emotional.

"To me, it seems at this point, given the economy, given the stress that people are under, one of the bright spots in our lives are the arts, the cultural parts of our city," Ms. Munn said. "It nourishes our souls and spirits and we need it badly. I think it's emotionally shortsighted. We're cutting out a part of the heart and soul of our city."

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The artistic director of the renowned Public Theater is known for his sometimes manic enthusiasm. He’s like the Music Man leading the parade while singing a rousing rendition of “Seventy-Six Trombones”—and no particular harm in that. But in his natural exuberance, he gets things wrong. Among a number of lapses I could mention, by far the most serious is that he’s lately begun paying tribute to “the founders of the Public Theater, Joseph Papp and Bernard Gersten.”

The first time was on national TV during his excited acceptance speech when the Public won its well-deserved Tony for Hair. Then, at the recent gala dinner for the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night, Mr. Eustis twice celebrated his new co-founders of the Public, Joseph Papp and Bernard Gersten.

Mr. Eustis surely means no harm—or offense—in his rewrite of theater history. But his surprising pronouncement comes as a shock to at least a few of us—including, I dare say, the good Bernard Gersten.

Mr. Gersten, the distinguished executive producer of Lincoln Center Theater, was the late Joseph Papp’s associate producer and loyal right-hand man for 18 years, and his honorable place in New York theater history is assured. But he began working for his old friend in 1960—six years after the legendary Papp dreamed up his most extraordinary achievement of free Shakespeare in the Park.

The autocratic Papp wasn’t always loved, and he wasn’t always fair. But his victorious battle with New York’s all-powerful Robert Moses for free Shakespeare and the building of the open-air Delacorte Theater in the Park has long since gone down in theater history. Mr. Eustis has only to glance at Helen Epstein’s vivid, authorized biography, Joe Papp: An American Life, to learn that Papp alone founded the New York Shakespeare Festival—which became the Public Theater—and that Mr. Gersten himself has paid generous tribute to the fact.

In his cruelest act, Papp fired Bernard Gersten for vague and paranoid reasons. Ms Epstein records how years later, Mr. Gersten described himself as Kent to Papp’s King Lear. “What would you with me, sir?” Lear asks Kent. “I would serve you, sir,” Kent replies.

Papp also fired another of his lieutenants, Merle Debusky, his loyal press man and wise counselor for 30 years. He also fell out lethally with Stuart Vaughan, his first artistic director during the 1950s. Theater has never been a relaxed place.

But the least Mr. Eustis could do is get Papp’s legacy right. He’s been gone nearly 18 years. Yet it’s only a short while ago that the theater he founded on Lafayette Street was named the Joseph Papp Public Theater.

Memory still ought to count for something—yes? It’s why we look to Oskar Eustis to do the right thing and set the record straight.

PAPP’S ORIGINAL ideal for Shakespeare was basically anti-British. He reacted passionately against the declamatory high acting style of the British thea-tah. As a Brit who was raised on Shakespeare, I’ve always been in favor of Papp’s profound belief in a refreshing American naturalism and wit. I draw the line only at the Public’s frustrating tradition of Shakespeare in the Park productions where anything goes.

The pleasure of Daniel Sullivan’s new production of Twelfth Night, subtitled by Shakespeare or What You Will (“Anything Goes,” as it were)—is in the veteran Mr. Sullivan’s mostly superior cast and unusual care in the verse-speaking. Its weakness, ironically, is that it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Its even, predictable pace isn’t swift or manic enough for Shakespeare’s festive, wild imaginings about an illusory Illyria where everyone falls madly in love with the wrong person. The romantic comedy’s seductive, cross-dressing eroticism is absent. In her lovely, assured Shakespeare debut as Viola disguised as a boy, Anne Hathaway makes a better boy than a girl. Her dashing disguise in drag as Cesario frees her. Ms Hathaway has it all—except, as yet, the experience that allows lyricism to breathe unhurried.

But the strange and wonderful sexual attraction between Viola/Cesario and Duke Orsino (Raúl Esparza, dripping in curls and melancholy) never begins to come to the beguiling boil. Sexual repression is a particular kind of Englishness—an England where the rain it raineth every day beyond a retractable roof.

The Olivia of Audra McDonald is at first too arch, and her yearning for Cesario, alas, too broad. David Pittu is in excellent voice as an assured Feste, although he drifts into camp. (The appealing original score is written and performed by Hem.) Julie White is swell—and great fun—as the scheming below-stairs broad, Maria. But Sir Toby Belch, that cut-price Falstaff, has always been a pickled, belching bore to me, no matter who plays him. The idiotic aristocrat, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, less so—particularly when played so amusingly by Hamish Linklater. But a Malvolio who cannot ultimately touch us in his too punished self-delusion and ambition is no Malvolio.

Twelfth Night’s Illyria is England. Whereas the new production’s Illyria appears to be a tree-lined miniature golf course with little astroturf hillocks. No matter! That’s almost comfortingly normal at the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park, where anything—usually—goes.

jheilpern@observer.com

 “This whole experience is just a wonderful experience from beginning to end," said.Law and Order’s Sam Waterston, who has performed at the Delacorte in Much Ado about Nothing and in two productions of Hamlet. " To be a member of the audience, to be in the shows, to have the sun go down, to have the whole city concentrated around this 'O' here"--he indicated the round theater--"is just a wonderful experience. Whether you’re up there or out here, it’s just great.”

Actor Liev Schreiber offered a different opinion. “It’s much more fun to be in it. Any time I go to a show that I’m not in, I feel a little bit like I’m intruding. Especially here. And I get envious. To have a night when it’s not raining and it’s not hot, the gala’s going well, you know at 8 oclock, you’re almost positive it’s not going to rain, you’ve got a keyed up audience. There’s nothing quite like the gala night. The audience is completely keyed up. I’m jealous.”

Ms. Parks, who excitedly proclaimed, “It’s a beautiful day! Yay!” said that her favorite part of Shakespeare in the Park is “That it’s free! And they say the best things in life are free, so there you go. This must be one of the best things in life because it’s free.”

Jane Krakowski, meanwhile, recalled her childhood experiences as an audience member, saying “Since I was a little kid--I grew up in New Jersey--I’ve been coming in with my parents and waiting in line all day and having a picnic and finally getting your tickets and watching the show, there’s something so romantic about being out on a New York summer and looking over at the castle and over the pond, and it’s just one of those great New York experiences.”

Mr. Schreiber recalled another aspect of performing at the outdoor Delacorte theater, one that’s been causing the current company a bit of mischief. “I had a raccoon wander up on stage in the middle of a soliloquy in Cymbeline. And he just kind of stared at me as if I was a hack actor. He almost looked like he had his arms folded. He was watching me … totally unimpressed.”

Mr. Kushner says the raccoons are one of his favorite parts of the Shakespeare in the Park experience. “I love the raccoons on the stage! They’re very tough [critics].”

Alas, no raccoons made it on stage during the performance, but Anne Hathaway as a cross-dressed Viola and Raul Esparza as Orsino sizzled next to Audra McDonald, who played one lusty Olivia. 

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