Story in 2 sentences:
Three witches tell Macbeth he's going to be king, so he
kills his way to the throne. His wife is a piece of work.
People who should see this show:
People with deep voices
People who need a nap
Well, someone must have said it backstage.
Macbeth.
Macbeth Macbeth Macbeth.
I had been looking forward to this one. I enjoy Colleen Wheeler and Duncan
Fraser, I think Lois Anderson is the bomb, and I have always liked this
play. Hubby had also been looking
forward to it; it's short. Amazing how the perfect ingredients can still make a
horrible dish.
Let's start with the performances.
Colleen Wheeler has a lovely resonant voice, and she
certainly knows it. By her second
line, I had begun to understand what had annoyed me so much about the
witches: she had laid down the
gauntlet and they had accepted the challenge. They were having a resonant voice contest. Combined with Bob Frazer's incredible
dramatic technique - look noble and speak slowly (I once heard a director
accuse an actor of being a black hole on stage, which perfectly describes
Frazer's performance) - their scenes were interminable. I swear they ran out of
underscoring.
The rest of the cast had their problems as well: Anton Lipovetsky's wide- eyed Malcolm, for example. I had been pleased to see him
cast in a Bard show, having liked his performance in Rent a few years ago, but
he was a disappointment as Malcolm:
uninteresting histrionics combined with focus- pulling mugging. Speaking of mugging, John Murphy, playing several smaller
parts, firmly believed he was the only one onstage. His cookie-cutter porter was
annoyingly out of place in this plodding dramatic work.
Plodding, you say? Let's
talk about direction. First
of all, a purely technical note:
the stage is a thrust, and it was blocked for a proscenium. Which alienates half of the audience.
Artistically, it was uninspired.
Everyone knows Macbeth. We've all studied it.
The reason to see it at Bard is to see something you haven't noticed
before, and, hopefully, a special little twist that gives you a new
insight. The new thing I noticed
was that there are an awful lot of monologues. Seriously.
That's it. The design was
similarly uninspired. In that
there was basically no set design and the drab costumes (meant to highlight the somber
mood of the piece) highlighted only the boredom one felt as one waited for
intermission. And then curtain. No one would ever put up with this if
it were a contemporary playwright, but it seems that every year there is at
least one Bard director who doesn’t see the need to do any real work.
Don't bother.
Save your money for The Merry Wives of Windsor. Plays until September 20th.
Some highlights:
Craig Erickson's Banquo: by far the strongest
of the cast.
The witches turning invisible: that was pretty cool.
Banquo's ghost scene:
really well done, and the only reason I came back for the second act (turned out there was nothing worthwhile to see after that, though).
