A tale of malice, matrimony and murder, MACBETH tells the story of one couple’s obsession with power—and their guilt after doing the unthinkable. For 15 weeks only, this thrilling new production will capture the passion and ferocity of Shakespeare’s most haunting text like never before.
Broadway's 2021-22 comeback season goes out with a shrug in Sam Gold's production of Macbeth, the kind of passive-aggressive theater party that invites two big stars to attend-Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga as the regicidal title couple-and then makes a point of ignoring them. Short, eloquent, violent and packed with sensational business (murder! witches! madness! ghosts! a decapitated head!), Macbeth is usually one of Shakespeare's most exciting plays. Not so here: Deliberately murky, this anemic modern-dress production creeps at a petty pace from scene to scene, to the last syllable of the tragedy's verse and beyond into a wistful folk-song coda.
Not only does this street-clothes production do away with any sense of regality, save for a luxurious robe Craig wears in the second act (costumes by Suttirat Larlarb), but Gold's vision is to make Macbeth as 'approachable' as possible. A pre-show speech by the hilarious Michael Patrick Thornton informs us of Shakespeare's time writing this as a plague raged through England and people turned toward the supernatural. It's close to the audience interactions famously espoused by traditional Globe productions - which a note in the Playbill unwisely evokes - but this attempt to appeal to the everyman becomes tiresome.
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