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Anne Hathaway in Shakespeare in the Park’s ‘Twelfth Night’ June 10 - July 12

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Lynne:
I really really want to make it down for one of Anne's performances!

Aloysius J. Gleek:



--- Quote from: Lynne on May 25, 2009, 01:06:41 am ---I really really want to make it down for one of Anne's performances!

--- End quote ---


Yay!

 8)

Aloysius J. Gleek:


How exactly does Shakespeare in the Park work
(in terms of tickets, reservations, etc.)? 


Ok, FIRST--you donate a lotta money! ( :o ) or

SECOND--you try to win a ticket online for a certain day or one of a range of days (Meryl actually won once--I've never even tried) or

THIRD--like most Noo Yawkas, you stand "ON" line (the rest of the English Speaking World, if you're not queueing, you're standing "IN" line).


This is how it works:

If it's going to be a very popular show--and I think Anne Hathaway will be--you have to get up REALLY, REALLY EARLY, to the Delacorte Theatre, and STAND ON LINE. BUT: There Are Very Important Caveats and Protocals, To Wit:

If you can be there by 6:00 AM, good. You're in!

By 7:00 AM, you have a really good chance--I hope.

8:00 AM, well, maybe, but--probably no.

After  8:00 AM? For a popular show? As we say in New York: No Way! (Or, Whaddya Tawkin' About--Fugettaboutit!!)

(If you arrive after 9:00 AM, and if you are very optimistic (or if you are very STUBBORN), the nice line monitors will keep a guesstimate head count at some point, about, oh, 11:00ish o'clock, or so, and say--no chance, sorry. If it's close, and you feel lucky?? Well, wait and see. Once I got the LAST PAIR OF TICKETS to see 'HAIR'--MAYBE--they told me at 2:00 PM that I HAD to come back at 6:00ish and wait again, AND IT WORKED--great seats, too, a pair of patrons tickets given back--but it was a fluke. GET THERE AT 7 AM the latest!)

Oh, right, YOU thought that if you got yourself TO the perimeter of Central Park BY 7:00 AM, that was ok?? Nooooooo, no, no, no! You have to walk all the way THROUGH the CENTER of the park to the theater, THEN you have to follow all along to the fast moving back of the line--

In other words, if you want to be AT THE BACK OF THE LINE at 7:00 AM, figure you are walking into the NEAREST entrance (Either Fifth Avenue OR Central Park West) by 6:40 the Latest.

Does this seem like Boot Camp yet?? Wake up, Soldier!! Up and at'em!!


NOW. THE FINE DETAILS.

You thought you could show up at 6:00 AM, get your (admittedly, FREE ) tickets, and go home?

NO!
You have to WAIT until they GIVE OUT THE TICKETS UNTIL 1:00 PM (but it is really 1:30 or even 1:45).
And there's more!

Good thing is: Each Person Standing ON Line gets TWO tickets--but no more. SO:

If you want THREE tickets together, at least TWO people on line have to be actually BE there FROM THE BEGINNING--

Yes, the Line is POLICED!! (Friendly, but firmly.) In other words, if YOU get there at 6:00 AM, and second friend shows up at 7:25 AM, sorry, no, she cannot join the first friend, she must go to the much longer line. You BOTH may get two sets of two tickets (and weirdly, the second set may be better than the first) but you will definitely sitting in different part of the theater.

Anyway, depending on HOW MANY TICKETS in a contiguous block you want, how many people people have to stand on line--and can you sit??

Well:

For FOUR Tickets, TWO People must stand on line--
For FIVE Tickets, THREE People must stand on line--
For SIX Tickets, THREE People must stand on line--
For SEVEN Tickets, FOUR People must stand on line--
For EIGHT Tickets, FOUR People must stand on line--

and so one, ad infinitum.

SO--if you want NINE Tickets together,  and FIVE People have to wait and the other four get to sleep in, go shopping, sightseeing, etc., well--to you really have to really be there the WHOLE time? Can you sit? Eat? BATHROOM BREAKS?????

Here how it works:

The line snakes back into the park in a truly serpentine circuit--sometimes under the trees, sometimes completely open, and sometimes HAPPILY, by random chance, your part of the line forms alongside banks of park benches. WHEN THAT HAPPENS, you have won the Park Bench Award--you get to sit there SIX (or seven) hours until 1:00 - 1:45, when they call you up, one by one, at the ticket window. Once you have your tickets, YOU ARE FREE to go home, sleep, etc., til you can come back just 15 - 20 minutes "curtain" time (except there is no curtain)!

IF YOU DO NOT win the Park Bench Lottery, what then??

People bring blankets (Me--like three to cushion my admittedly boney butt.)
People bring Pillows. They bring Air Mattresses. They bring BEACH CHAIRS.

You get the idea.

Yes, they bring food--but guess what, you can even ORDER--guys from a designated deli bicycles back and forth asking anyone wants anything. Then, about 45 minutes to an hour, the guy wanders back and doesn't remember you are the same person, and you have to knock him down off the bicycle and get your coffee and bagel with schmear. If you're lucky.

BATHROOM BREAKS: Yes, You Can!!--the nice Line Monitor will have learned to know you by face AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, Your Line Peers, before and Aft, will know who you are--you can just say you're going to the loo. You LEAVE all your stuff--YES, IT'S OK, REALLY--I mean, don't leave your sable or the Philip Patek watch sitting on the top of the pile, but otherwise, even if you are the ONLY person waiting on line to get two tickets, YES, you can leave your stuff in the middle of the park, you walk all the way to the front of the line, and go to the loo just next to the Delacorte Theater. Then you go back. If you try and play cute, SAY you're going to the loo, then go HOME, sleep, do the laundry, have a liesurely lunch, then come back FOUR HOURS LATER, forget it--your stuff is still there, but PEER PRESSURE and the LINE MONITORS will say--sorry Charlie, NO TICKETS FOR YOU!!

(You must be wondering--don't people get OTHERS to get tickets for them--by, ahem, MONEY??? Yes, obviously, and this is where things get TRICKY and even DELICATE. The monitors are looking for people who come back day after day, and maybe DON'T look like legitimate Theatre Geeks (or Anne Hathaway fans) and also--there are, shall we say, CLASS ISSUES, sadly. But the Administrators of the Public Theater are serious--this is a FREE theater, and tickets are FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED. Weeks will go by, then one fine day--wham--there is a huge exodus of "free-lance" NON-legitimate patrons. And so it goes.

RAIN??

Of course, this is an OPEN AIR theater--and an OPEN AIR line!! FOLLOW THE WEATHER REPORTS!! Bring your umbrella! Bring some plastic sheeting, if you like.

In re: the Weather--well, 2008 was the NICEST New York Summer I have ever witnessed since 1994--the BEST. It was SUNNY, the temperature mostly ranged between 75 - 82, and the humidity was LOW--gorgeous. And it hardly ever rained during 'Hair'--really, great Karma!

In 2007--Unbelievably--bad. It not only rained every other day--IT STORMED. Even worse, when the day was gorgeous, and people waited all day to see the play, at 8:00 PM, the heavens opened. No play. So--you never know. Propitiate all your gods and hope for the best!

Did I scare you all?? Really, it's GREAT fun--I've been going to Shakespeare in the Park MYSELF (and with friends) since 1969, forty years ago! Hope I see you there!!

xxx
John



Video: Learn what goes on behind-the-scenes at
The Public Theater's summer Shakespeare Festival.
http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_newsroom/video/index.html?boro=M&page=1&key=161

Aloysius J. Gleek:



Really nice article--now, if the godamn RAIN will ever, ever stop, we'll run and see Anne's play!


http://nymag.com/guides/summer/2009/57459/





Her Enchanted Evenings
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.




By Amy Larocca
Published Jun 21, 2009

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. ”

Right now, Hathaway is navigating the treacherous world of fame, with regard to both her career and her so-called private life. With work, she has to balance groovy, troubling indies with explosive, glossy paydays (Bride Wars ) and somehow not become known exclusively for either.

And in spite of her efforts toward personal wholesomeness—she has described herself as a “Labrador puppy of a person”—she became tabloid candy last summer when her boyfriend of four years, Raffaello Follieri, was found to be a creepy con man who claimed to be in business with the Vatican and was promptly sentenced to prison.

“I don’t have the words to describe that yet,” she says, suddenly serious, her big eyes welling up with tears. “Hopefully at some point in my life I will have the words to describe what it was actually like, but at the moment, all I can say is that it was heavy, it was shocking, and I don’t completely understand it.”

The attention around Hathaway only grew when she got nominated for an Oscar for Rachel,  and now she can’t really get a cup of coffee without the moment being recorded by someone with a long-angle lens. Some of the paparazzi, she says, have “the morality of a wild animal who eats its young.

“There are enough reality-TV stars out there who clearly want attention and fame,” she adds. “I personally don’t think they know what they’re getting into, but it’s a very human instinct. I never wanted to be famous. I just wanted to act. So it’s very odd. Here I am doing something that’s a real actor thing to do and I’m being treated like a celebrity. I was going to take this year off from being a celebrity!”

Which is not to say she dislikes the fame, the glamour, the glitz. Remembering the Academy Awards ceremony, she exclaims, “It was like, Oh my God! I’m that girl! And I’m 26! I’m that girl! I’m sure for people who’ve been nominated multiple times there are more complicated feelings about what it all means, but I was like, You know what? I’m going to focus on the fairy-tale part of it. I’m just going to live in the stardust and the sparkle.” When Natalie Portman congratulated her on the red carpet, Hathaway’s response was “Who are you, you awesome creature of wonderfulness?”

Shakespeare in the Park is a considerably less sparkly, more arduous affair, and Hathaway likes it a great deal: She likes the long rehearsals, she likes slipping off to the uptown Shake Shack with cast and crew. It’s a bit of being the actress she imagined she’d be when, as a child in New Jersey, she decided to take after her mother, who acts in regional theater and has done so forever. “I hounded [Public Theater director] Oskar Eustis for years,” she says. After Rachel,  “I think it became more of a priority for him to get me onstage.” Hathaway stirs her coffee. “I do hope that doesn’t sound obnoxious.”



Hathaway and Raúl Esparza in Twelfth Night. 
(Photo: Joan Marcus)


She’s even enjoying the cross-dressing. “I was feeling like I could do more to get into my character,” she explains. “So I decided, What if I walked around New York trying to pass for a boy? What if I had to make people look twice to figure out what I was?  I kind of got dressed up, and there were six photographers outside. I was walking my dog, and they know my dog, so all of the sudden I’m in a terribly unflattering outfit, I look like I’m auditioning for West Side Story,  and it’s on the Internet! And it’s just like, I’m doing this for my job!”

She’s just visited the Hetrick-Martin Institute—her older brother is gay, and she has gotten very involved in various gay-rights causes—and finds herself thinking even more about the gender-bending aspect of her role. “I’m really going to lean in to that,” she says, before sighing a big sigh-of-contentment sigh. “It’s the most delicious, exhausting challenge.”

There are a number of films set to begin once the play ends and after some time spent immersed in a “gorgeous blanket of nurturing familiarity” (translation: family vacation). She’ll be in Garry Marshall’s Valentine’s Day,  with Julia Roberts and Shirley MacLaine (“We don’t have any scenes together, but hey, I get a poster!”). Talk of other projects swirls around her, but she’s coy about it. “I don’t mean to be, but sometimes things don’t work out in the end, and then people think it’s because you hate someone, and I don’t hate anyone!”

It has, however, been confirmed that she’ll be playing Judy Garland on Broadway, and that seems about right.

“This is so embarrassing, but one of the waitresses just walked by with a glass of white wine and I almost reached out and grabbed it. It would be lovely to have a bit of release, but no. I have to go to rehearsal. I don’t want to be the girl who shows up tipsy. But wouldn’t it be fun? Wouldn’t it be fun someday to be a grande dame who can get away with anything?”

Front-Ranger:
Thanks for a wonderful article! Go ahead and send the rain to Colorado...everybody else does!

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