Macbeth

The National Theater of Scotland's production of "Macbeth" at Ethel Barrymore Theatre, May 20, 2013

Posted by Mondschein

Alan Cumming returns to the Great White Way, reprising his one-man production of the Scottish Play following last summer's visit during the Lincoln Center Festival.

Under the direction of Once director John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg, it's another riff on Marat/Sade with inmates putting on the play.  Mr. Cumming appears to have arrived after an undisclosed traumatic event, bloodied and confused.  His caretakers (Jenny Sterlin and Brendan Titley) tend his wounds, collect his clothes and tissue from a cheek swab and under his fingernails.  It's something of a next step compared to the 2008 Broadway revival with Patrick Stewart perhaps, but I'm equally unconvinced of this concept as well.

Macbeth

"Macbeth" presented by Aquila Theatre at Gym at Judson, April 21, 2012

I first encountered Aquila when the company was in residence at the University of South Carolina.  Their approach to theatre was one of minimal production values but highly clever direction and staging.  Their production of The Iliad was eye-opening as they created the Argo using only a half dozen 6 foot poles. Aquila moved to New York in 1999 and has produced here regularly along with national tours and international performances. 

Perry Brass: All Human Wisdom: Revisiting Angels

picture courtesy Signature Theatre Company

“All human wisdom is summed up in two words; wait and hope.”

Alexandre Dumas Pere, last words in The Count of Monte Cristo.

My partner and I and another friend went to see the revival of Ton Kushner’s Angels in America at the Signature Theatre last night; my partner actually sat through both parts in one day, seeing Part One (“Millennium Approaches”) in the afternoon and then staying with us for Part Two (“Perestroika”) in the evening: an almost Wagnerian day of theater in the sheer exhaustion of concentration it takes.
Altogether, it was seven hours of sitting, so he could have flown to London in that amount of time, with little spurts of getting up to go to the bathroom. We did have dinner in between, so it was kind of like the way Eugene O’Neal’s 4-hour play “Strange Interlude” used to be staged, with a dinner break between the middle acts. But, again, Tony Kushner blows “Strange Interlude” out of the water: Eugene O’Neil must be choking on envy someplace, because, sadly enough, everything that he ever wanted to do, or be, or say but couldn’t is in Angels in America. We had both seen the original production of the first part when the plays were originally done on Broadway. I was blown away by the ending then of Part One, but since we actually saw on its last day of its Broadway run, there was no way to see Part Two. So I was all set to see how Angels ends, and I did.