The Weird Sisters at BAM (A Review): Macbeth

It's a shame that a play as old as William Shakespeare's Macbeth should seem so relevant, but it is, anyway you slice it. Watching the Chichester Festival Theatre's compelling production, now playing to sold-out audiences at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and set in a bleak totalitarian landscape, I was reminded too many times of the cruelties of contemporary warfare and the devastating consequences of acquiring political might for its own sake. Also, Nature gone haywire is a strong theme of the play, so the political tragedy is conjoined with environmental destruction.

Director Rupert Goold stages the play in a cold prison-like room, equipped with a refrigerator, a sink and a gated elevator with prison bars, that serves as torture chamber, operating room, military operations room, and banquet facility. Blood and wine, ripped flesh and a sandwich all share the same room. The effective lighting and sound design send up harsh lights and loud sounds, leaving little else to humanize the setting. Video projections of goose-stepping soldiers leave not much interpretation to chance.

Patrick Stewart, as Macbeth, plays the Scottish general as a coarse, superstitious and unsophisticated tyrant. He's barely aware of the consequences of his actions and only knows how to get more blood on his hands. Don't expect the big confidant voice of Captain Picard here, because Stewart brilliantly interprets Macbeth's language with short, clipped phrasing in a more shallow register. He physically conveys Macbeth as a small man at the outset of the play but then seems to grow larger and more swaggering in his speech as he becomes more dangerous. Stewart informs his performance with a reading of the life of Joseph Stalin, and the applied knowledge goes a long way in dragging the character uncomfortably to the modern era.

Macbeth's sexy, ambitious Lady, strongly played by Kate Fleetwood, stands by her man, effectively conveying how she's thwarted any softness on his behalf. During the banquet scene, played twice from different points of view, she's the hostess-with-the-most-est, laughing off Macbeth's delusions in order to save a good party. Her famous sleepwalk is chilling, one of the powerful signs that Nature has exacted revenge on these human violators. The play's most notable sign of the troubles brewing in "the fog and filthy air" is the inability to sleep, and Lady Macbeth's descent into guilt and madness compounds the tragedy.

The "weird sisters," as the witches are called, certainly the most memorable from anyone's youthful reading of the play, live up to their billing in this production. The weird sisters, dressed as '30s-era nurses, conjure a powerful trio as they shriek, scare, assist and entertain. The three convey several meanings with their incantation of the famous "trouble."

The ensemble cast is strong throughout, especially Martin Turner as Banquo, a powerful and worthy threat to the protagonist, Michael Feast as the rival Macduff, and Tim Treloar, making the most of Ross. Suzanne Burden conveys well the shock and fear of Lady Macduff, and watching the tragedy that awaits her and her precious children quickens the unfolding catastrophe. The Aristotelian cause-and-effect grows darker, more complex, more "unnatural," right up until the very end of "the dead butcher and his fiend-like queen."

A must-see production, if only to bear witness to these unnatural acts.

After concluding its run at BAM, the Chichester Festival Theatre's Macbeth begins performances at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway on March 29. 3 hours including intermission. (Playbill info )

(Note to Readers: Strangely, for a website that is mostly light-hearted, this is my second post with a mention of the Stalinist terror. The first citation was my homage to Leon Trotsky's young boy who, while living with his parents in New York, left home one day to see if there was a 1st Street. He later died in the Stalinist purges.)

Roundup: The Plaza Hotel, Sondheim's Seurat, the Texas Primary, and the Upcoming Gelato Showdown in the Village

As I gather my thoughts about the Chichester Festival Theatre's entertaining production of Macbeth that I saw last night at BAM, I would like to pass on a few updates and news items:

• I've now assembled all the posts from The New York of Raymond Hood, Architect self-guided walk onto new pages and placed them under the list of walks on the site's sidebar. I've added a small slideshow of more images of the buildings.

• The Plaza Hotel reopens Saturday, March 1, and I look forward to visiting. I've been meaning to comment on the story, "It's Lonely at the Plaza Hotel," by Christine Haughney from the February 17, 2008 edition of The New York Times. Apparently, the new condo owners are lonesome, as not everyone can afford a place in their legendary hotel. The story quotes one woman who told the reporter that she "wouldn’t mind meeting someone other than the decorators, real estate brokers and other service workers fussing over the apartments." I know exactly how she feels. All I can say is that I'm available. I would love to hang out in The Plaza. Anyone living at The Plaza who might be reading this and who would enjoy some company, please write walkbigapple@yahoo.com.

• Mapping Texas for the Primary. As a native Texan, I have many opinions about the upcoming Texas presidential primary. I recommend reading Randy Kennedy's NYT article, "Pieces of Texas Turn Primary Into a Puzzle," that explains the diversity of the vast Texas political landscape. My mother, a proper East Texan who wore skirts, hose, and high heels her entire life, thought I would become uncivilized if I spent any time with West Texans. Of course, I rebelled. No further evidence is necessary beyond looking in my closet and seeing what is not there.

• Art lovers suffering from a Seurat withdrawal after the closing of the exhibit at MoMA should make note that a new production of Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, now playing at Studio 54 (254 West 54th Street), has received good reviews and extended its run through June 15, 2008.

• (Image) Yesterday, I spotted the sign for the new gelato place coming to Bleecker Street later this spring. GROM's first NY location is up on Broadway on the Upper West Side. The Village location, an excellent site on Father Demo Square, will set up a showdown between this Turin-based upstart and L'Arte del Gelato on Seventh Ave. It will be like a spaghetti western but with gelato. As I posted earlier, I am observing a strict gelato diet for Lent. It's not going well.

Shakespeare, Always in New York

"How many goodly creatures are there here!" - Miranda, The Tempest (bonus points if you know the next line)

I always have it in mind to see every Shakespeare production in New York, because it seems like a goodly project, but it's nearly impossible to keep up with the Bard in New York City. I recently saw the Wooster Group's production of Hamlet (now closed) at the Public Theater. I thought their interpretation was brilliant in several passages but annoyingly distracting in others.

Cymbeline at Lincoln Center just opened to excellent reviews. (Vivian Beaumont)

Also playing: Richard III at Classic Stage Company (136 E. 13th St.) through Dec. 9.

For those who believe Christopher Marlowe wrote some of Shakespeare's plays, take notice that the Red Bull Theatre begins previews of Garland Wright's adaptation of Edward the Second beginning Dec. 11.

Gounod's Roméo et Juliette returns to the Metropolitan Opera on Dec. 8 at 8 p.m. Plácido Domingo conducts.

Also, the Shakespeare Garden in Central Park is open during regular park hours.

Image: WOTBA's photoshopped image of Shakespeare in front of City Hall.

Seurat Out Walking and Drawing on an Ordinary Sunday

Many people probably think Georges Seurat looks just like Mandy Patinkin, having become acquainted with the late 19th century French painter through Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George. While on my way to the Museum of Modern Art the other day, I remembered the dramatic spine-tingling dramatic sequence in the musical, hearing the music, too - "People strolling through the trees....Of a small suburban park....On an island in the river...." - when the actors slowly move to their assigned positions to assume roles within the tableau vivant of Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte–1884... "On an ordinary Sunday." Gives me chills just thinking about it.

MoMA's exhibition Georges Seurat: The Drawings opens up several avenues of peripatetic inquiry, so I've been hitting the books and scholarly literature to learn more about the late 19th century's craze for walking. Last night I read and underlined every word of "Everyday Life in Motion: The Art of Walking in Late-Nineteenth-Century Paris" (The Art Bulletin. Dec 1., 2005) by the late Nancy Forgione, a brilliant art historian who possessed a keen understanding of walking as well as painting. You can read the essay, sans images, here.

Among her brilliant observations, Forgione emphasizes the way walking engages the body, mind and vision, so much so that walking leads to a fuller understanding of the self. Walking through the cityscape can become the means by which our inner and outer worlds can be more fully integrated. Of the late-nineteenth-century painters, she writes, "Like other confirmed walkers throughout history, the artists seem to understand the body's role in mediating between consciousness and the world."

See? See? See? Walking makes you smarter and more artistic, except, of course, when talking on a cell phone at the same time. While walking and talking on a phone, the self splits away from the here-and-now of the street and shatters into several pieces, falling with other debris onto the sidewalk and into the gutter.

Georges Seurat: The Drawings continues at The Museum of Modern Art through January 7, 2008. View the online exhibition here.

See the related post: Walking With Seurat in the Deepening Darkness.