New York City » Anne Hathaway, Audra McDonald and Raul Esparza in "Twelfth Night" -- that trio offers star power equal to any we've come to expect from the Public Theater's free Shakespeare in New York's Central Park. Now add formidable support from Michael Cumpsty, David Pittu and Julie White, along with flashy direction from Daniel Sullivan, and you have a rollicking show.

Is it entirely Shakespeare? Perhaps it doesn't matter in this comedy of cross-dressing, mistaken identity and final marital bliss.

Hathaway, though slightly shortchanging the poetic, expertly blends the boyish and the womanly in Viola. McDonald, while playing a more contemporary, less aristocratic Olivia, invests her with brio. Cumpsty, auburn-wigged, puts across Malvolio's arrogance and subsequent pathos perfectly.

Sullivan is, to be sure, a canny director and you may observe countless clever staging touches. These include making the knolls of John Lee Beatty's ravishing, if problematic set into veritable playground slides; having the newly deluded Malvolio first appear as a fatuously smiling, seemingly disembodied Cheshire-cat head; getting the scared Sir Andrew Aguecheek to fall as if thunderstruck flat on his back; and much, much more.

Lusty business indeed, but "Twelfth Night" is in some ways a dark comedy. Not for nothing does it begin with a shipwreck in which a principal character may have drowned, soon followed by Feste the Fool's song invoking mortality ("come away death"), and leading to an ending with the melancholy ditty about the rain that "raineth every day" (which our current weather all too obligingly corroborates).

Supporting the felicitous leads, David Pittu is a riotous and well-sung Feste, with the right touch of troubling insolence; White milks Maria's laughs with cowgirlish expertise; Jay O. Sanders precisely balances Sir Toby Belch's overbearingness with deflatability; and Hamish Linklater's over- the-top Aguecheek overdoes so consummately it feels like underplaying.

My only quarrel is with the wonderful Raul Esparza, whose Duke Orsino could use more hauteur and a less Orphan Annieish wig, and who might show greater affection for Viola as a boy to make his prompt embrace of her as a fiancee more believable.

Still, this "Twelfth Night" is mostly for gushing innocents or indulgent sophisticates; those in between had better beware.