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Visuals reign in lackluster ‘Macbeth’
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Reviewed by: MARGI HERWALD ZITELLI City Editor
William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” is a dark tale of ambition, paranoia and murder. Sounds exciting, huh?
In Great Lakes Theater Festival’s current production, running through Nov. 7 at the newly renovated PlayhouseSquare Hanna Theatre (see sidebar), “Macbeth” looks every bit as exciting as a story of murderous mayhem and unraveling minds should. It just doesn’t feel very exciting.
It is a visually stunning production, but the acting and sense of storytelling are lackluster.
We all know the story. Scottish thane Macbeth, in the favor of King Duncan, receives a supernatural prediction from a trio of witches that he will someday be king. With the help and zealous encouragement of his wife, Macbeth kills the king and assumes his throne. He then descends into a downward spiral of madness and murder as he tries to, at first, conceal his crime, and later, snuff out any threats to his power.
Director Charles Fee and his design team have given this “Macbeth” an Asian flavor (with a few Celtic symbols thrown in). Star Moxley’s costumes, in black and gold with splashes of red, either resemble kimonos with flowing sleeves or feature a silhouette like samurai armor. Actors all carry katana swords.
Gage Williams’s striking set features white screens, webbed with black slats, that span the proscenium. Most of the action takes place on the Hanna’s new three-quarter thrust stage that juts out into the audience. A single round, red platform in the center of the thrust cuts the otherwise neutral palette. Fee makes the most the space, sending his actors all around the proscenium and thrust, up and down the aisles through the audience, and rising dramatically from underneath the thrust stage.
My favorite parts of the show were the drummers and the witches. Fee has placed on stage two percussionists (Seth Asa Sengel and Matthew Webb), dressed in Asian robes, who play all the production’s underscoring. They even play cymbal-like, metallic panels hung on the set. The music is sometimes driving and war-like, sometimes eerie and unsettling. It makes the show.
The three “weird sisters” who torment Macbeth with their predictions of the future are visually fantastic. With kabuki-style white painted faces, the witches (Sara M. Bruner, Laura Welsh Berg and Cathy Prince) move like insidious birds. Poles built within their draping, black robes serve as wing-like extensions of their arms that can either be lifted above to cloak their faces or held to the floor like canes to give them a crouched, square stance.
The program notes acknowledge that all this Asian influence doesn’t (and wasn’t intended to) reflect the play’s Scottish setting. Shakespeare purists may not like it, but it lends a unique, cool vibe to the play.
The actors, however, don’t live up to the design concept’s intriguing promise. Most of the cast delivers Shakespeare’s lines in grand Shakespearean voices, but without much real emotion, save for the occasional smattering of melodrama.
As Macbeth, Dougfred Miller handles the language and the physical demands of the leading role well. He’s just not that interesting. However, he did bring down the house on opening night with a fabulous take on the line “Thou wast born of woman.”
As Lady Macbeth, Laura Perrotta is forgettable. She takes a role beloved by actresses for its passion, strength and ultimate descent into madness and does nothing with it. She doesn’t even fit the Asian aesthetic, clad in a blood red Greek-style gown with Rapunzel-meets-Swiss Miss braids.
Even the extremely cool-looking and agile witches don’t fully deliver. While their unsettling choreography and dark appearances are fascinating, whenever the witches open their mouths, the illusion is broken, as their unison spells and incantations sound like sorority sisters making a high-pitched house pledge.
The two standouts in the cast are Lynn Robert Berg as Banquo, Macbeth’s dear friend who soon becomes his victim, and David Anthony Smith as Macduff, Macbeth’s rival and ultimate undoing. Berg endows his grounded Banquo with both gravity and humor. While it took me awhile to warm up to Smith, his stalwart Macduff is the only character in the entire play to react viscerally to any of the copious deaths that occur. His tears and grief are the only emotional touchstone in a production in which King Duncan’s sons Malcolm (the serviceable Phil Carroll) and Donalbain (the supremely miscast Tim Try) react to news of their father’s murder as they would to news the armory is out of their favorite boots. Oh … bummer.
There is much to intrigue the eyes in this stylish “Macbeth,” but little to move, frighten or capture the heart.
mherwald@cjn.org
William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” is a dark tale of ambition, paranoia and murder. Sounds exciting, huh?
In Great Lakes Theater Festival’s current production, running through Nov. 7 at the newly renovated PlayhouseSquare Hanna Theatre (see sidebar), “Macbeth” looks every bit as exciting as a story of murderous mayhem and unraveling minds should. It just doesn’t feel very exciting.
It is a visually stunning production, but the acting and sense of storytelling are lackluster.
We all know the story. Scottish thane Macbeth, in the favor of King Duncan, receives a supernatural prediction from a trio of witches that he will someday be king. With the help and zealous encouragement of his wife, Macbeth kills the king and assumes his throne. He then descends into a downward spiral of madness and murder as he tries to, at first, conceal his crime, and later, snuff out any threats to his power.
Director Charles Fee and his design team have given this “Macbeth” an Asian flavor (with a few Celtic symbols thrown in). Star Moxley’s costumes, in black and gold with splashes of red, either resemble kimonos with flowing sleeves or feature a silhouette like samurai armor. Actors all carry katana swords.
Gage Williams’s striking set features white screens, webbed with black slats, that span the proscenium. Most of the action takes place on the Hanna’s new three-quarter thrust stage that juts out into the audience. A single round, red platform in the center of the thrust cuts the otherwise neutral palette. Fee makes the most the space, sending his actors all around the proscenium and thrust, up and down the aisles through the audience, and rising dramatically from underneath the thrust stage.
My favorite parts of the show were the drummers and the witches. Fee has placed on stage two percussionists (Seth Asa Sengel and Matthew Webb), dressed in Asian robes, who play all the production’s underscoring. They even play cymbal-like, metallic panels hung on the set. The music is sometimes driving and war-like, sometimes eerie and unsettling. It makes the show.
The three “weird sisters” who torment Macbeth with their predictions of the future are visually fantastic. With kabuki-style white painted faces, the witches (Sara M. Bruner, Laura Welsh Berg and Cathy Prince) move like insidious birds. Poles built within their draping, black robes serve as wing-like extensions of their arms that can either be lifted above to cloak their faces or held to the floor like canes to give them a crouched, square stance.
The program notes acknowledge that all this Asian influence doesn’t (and wasn’t intended to) reflect the play’s Scottish setting. Shakespeare purists may not like it, but it lends a unique, cool vibe to the play.
The actors, however, don’t live up to the design concept’s intriguing promise. Most of the cast delivers Shakespeare’s lines in grand Shakespearean voices, but without much real emotion, save for the occasional smattering of melodrama.
As Macbeth, Dougfred Miller handles the language and the physical demands of the leading role well. He’s just not that interesting. However, he did bring down the house on opening night with a fabulous take on the line “Thou wast born of woman.”
As Lady Macbeth, Laura Perrotta is forgettable. She takes a role beloved by actresses for its passion, strength and ultimate descent into madness and does nothing with it. She doesn’t even fit the Asian aesthetic, clad in a blood red Greek-style gown with Rapunzel-meets-Swiss Miss braids.
Even the extremely cool-looking and agile witches don’t fully deliver. While their unsettling choreography and dark appearances are fascinating, whenever the witches open their mouths, the illusion is broken, as their unison spells and incantations sound like sorority sisters making a high-pitched house pledge.
The two standouts in the cast are Lynn Robert Berg as Banquo, Macbeth’s dear friend who soon becomes his victim, and David Anthony Smith as Macduff, Macbeth’s rival and ultimate undoing. Berg endows his grounded Banquo with both gravity and humor. While it took me awhile to warm up to Smith, his stalwart Macduff is the only character in the entire play to react viscerally to any of the copious deaths that occur. His tears and grief are the only emotional touchstone in a production in which King Duncan’s sons Malcolm (the serviceable Phil Carroll) and Donalbain (the supremely miscast Tim Try) react to news of their father’s murder as they would to news the armory is out of their favorite boots. Oh … bummer.
There is much to intrigue the eyes in this stylish “Macbeth,” but little to move, frighten or capture the heart.
mherwald@cjn.org
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