It’s not exactly Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline performing The Seagull in Central Park, as they did last summer, but Boston’s own purveyor of free summertime Shakespeare, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, has announced that this year for the first time it will offer not only outstanding Boston-based talent but a Broadway star. Anthony Rapp, who created the role of filmmaker Mark in Jonathan Larson’s megahit rock musical Rent and who plays Bender in the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, will join the troupe to play the title character in this summer’s offering, Henry V, which thunders onto the Parkman Bandstand July 19 through August 4.

Rapp, who has also appeared on Broadway in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Six Degrees of Separation (and who is the brother of American Repertory Theatre–sweetheart playwright Adam Rapp), appeared Tuesday at a press conference at the Wang Theatre to express his enthusiasm for the production, which CSC artistic director Steven Maler assures us will not be, despite its rallying depiction of Henry V’s heroic 1415 triumph at Agincourt and the play’s post–September 11 selection, "blindly patriotic." It is a play, Maler says, about "what defines a leader." Rapp goes farther, suggesting parallels between the good ol’ boy who was Prince Hal and America’s own current president. "Not that we’ll play him as a shlemiel," he adds.

A year ago the Wang Center for the Performing Arts announced a partnership with Commonwealth Shakespeare Company and made a $75,000 gift to the company, which has grown since its 1996 debut, when four performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream were seen by some 2000 people, to last summer’s deliriously funny and fetching Twelfth Night, which brought 45,000 viewers to Boston Common. This year, announced Wang Center trustee and Poduska Family Foundation president Susan Poduska, the Poduska Family Foundation (a $1 million contributor to the Wang) will match the Wang’s gift to CSC of $75,000. With arts funding at both city and state levels being drastically cut, as Wang president and CEO Josiah Spaulding noted ominously at the press conference, that’s reason enough to "Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’"