'As You Like It' and 'Into The Woods' Will Be This Summer's Central Park Productions This summer will mark the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, and to mark the occasion, the Public Theater on Thursday announced a production meant to take full advantage of that setting: a revival of the 1987 Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical "Into the Woods" that is based on an acclaimed London staging performed outdoors in Regent's Park there. The New York production of "Into the Woods," part of the annual Shakespeare in the Park series, will have a brand new American cast but will be directed by the same team in charge of the London production, Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel, with performances scheduled to start late in July. Perhaps just as crucially, the set designers will be Soutra Gilmour, who gave the London production what many praised as its extraordinary look, including walkways that extended towards the trees surrounding the stage, and John Lee Beatty. "We think the basic concept was such a beautiful and brilliant one that we have no desire to change it," said Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater. Of course, this will be a different space - we don't have such trees available to us - so we'll have to come up with an aestheticization of that. But theirs was a fantastic concept, so we're going to run with those ideas. The season's other offering will be the pastoral comedy "As You Like It," scheduled for June and set, of course, in the Forest of Arden. The combination is far from accidental, Mr. Eustis acknowledged, and not just because "Into the Woods" seems to be literal and living proof of the most famous line from "As You Like It": "All the world's a stage." "Both of these plays, as luck would have it, are about people who retreat into the forest and discover true values, values that have been lost in the city," Mr. Eustis said. So it makes for a really resonant pairing. Lily Rabe, who starred as Portia in "Merchant of Venice" in the park two summers ago (and later on Broadway), will play Rosalind in "As You Like It," with Daniel Sullivan directing. Casting has not yet been determined for "Into the Woods," though Mr. Eustis said interest in the production is so high among local actors that he's "been getting more high-powered phone calls" than he can ever recall.