The main problem I had with the production of MacBeth we went to see
tonight was that the title character looked so much like Breaking Bad's Walter
White. In fact, if he had a pork pie hat, you'd have been hard pressed to tell the
difference.
The review is going to be difficult to write because I liked a lot of
it, but there were a lot of reasons not to like it. It was like the
difference between Star Trek, the original series, and Star Trek
the movie, where we get to know Kirk and Spock and all the other familiar characters in
their youth. In the TV show, they didn't rely on high tech stuff to make a
point. In fact, it's pretty laughably low tech, by today's standards. Now, though,
they have perfected CGI and blowing up stuff and people seem to expect the special
effects, and so the movie was more about this or that special effect than it was about the
development of the characters.
So it was with MacBeth (which I refuse to call "The
Scottish Play," because I'm not in the theatre and I think it's an
affectation to do so otherwise!) (According to a theatrical superstition, called the
"Scottish curse," speaking the name Macbeth inside a theatre will cause
disaster. A variation of the superstition forbids direct quotation of the play (except
during rehearsals) while inside a theater.)
This was a revised version (which already is suspect...who revises Shakespeare?)
which was set in some post-apocalyptic time when everyone is at war with everyone,
but apparently all the guns have been destroyed because they are still fighting with
swords and daggers. But everybody is dirty and torn all the time. And some
men's roles are played by women, which is disconcerting especially when talking about
"Banquo's seed," when Banquo was played by a woman.
They shortened the script a lot and I don't know the play well enough
to be able to know when they cut lines or scenes the way I could do if they truncated any
Gilbert & Sullivan play. But Lady MacBeth never wailed that the perfumes of
Arabia couldn't sweeten her little hand...her famous speech was cut short.
But it was powerful. And intense. And that was a big
problem...there was no nuance in it. It was an intense ride from the GetGo. It
seemed that they went from MacBeth being named Thane of Cawdor to Lady MacB instantly
deciding to kill the king. There was no lead up to it. "Hi, Honey, I'm
home." "Good--go kill the king." Whereupon this towering hulk
of a man becomes a quivering idiot afraid of his own shadow. It was just....too
much.
And the three witches suffered from excessive technological
assistance. Their voices were run through some sort of synthesizer, designed, I
guess, to make them sound more "other worldly," though they sounded so other
worldly that you couldn't understand what they were saying. And in Act 2, either the
special effect gizmo failed or they were allowed to use their own voices for clarity, but
they had so much head gear on that it was like trying to speak through a heavy curtain and
so they were difficult to hear.
We had gone to the show with the Grand Old Man of Sacramento Theater,
a 90 year old friend who had performed with the likes of Katharine Hepburn and a host of
other luminaries in his day. His apartment is filled with such mementos he could charge
admission to let theater afficionados come in and just browse.
When the show was over, I asked him what he thought. "Not
much," he said and went on to explain that in their desire to reshape the show and
give it a unique quality, they had forgotten the power of Shakespeare's words. I was glad
to have my opinion backed by a competent authority. I knew that I was disturbed by
the production, but couldn't put my finger on why.
At the after-show reception, Lady MacBeth, whom I consider the grand dame of Sacramento theater, came to where we were
sitting. She's a longtime friend of my friend and they are in the process of
creating a special project together next year. He started telling her of his
complaints about the show, though told her she was the only one in the cast who got
Shakespeare's words "right."
She told him he should not talk in front of me because I
would take what he had to say and write it in my review.
Actually, even if I could remember all that he said, I couldn't do it
because I don't have the expertise in Shakespeare to get it right. But he did kind
of tacitly give me "permission" to complain about the show and his words pointed
out to me why I was uncomfortable with a lot of it. I valued his opinion.
We had some of the goodies at the opening night party. I fell
in love with a huge bowl of hummus. I'm not ordinarly a great hummus eater, but this
was almost as good as some that I had on our cruise, which I thought at the time was some
of the best hummus I'd ever tasted. The wife of another critic told me she thought
it was from Costco, so now I have to go to Costco and buy hummus.
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