Macbeth (2013)
Opening Night: April 21, 2013
Closing: July 14, 2013
Theater: Ethel Barrymore
Direct from acclaimed, sold-out engagements at the National Theatre of Scotland and the Lincoln Center Festival, Tony and Olivier Award winner ("Cabaret") and two-time Emmy nominee ("The Good Wife") Alan Cumming returns to Broadway this spring in a thrilling one-man interpretation of Shakespeare’s darkest and most powerful tragedy, Macbeth. This Macbeth is set in a clinical room deep within a dark psychiatric unit. Cumming is the lone patient, reliving the infamous story and inhabiting each role himself. Closed circuit television cameras watch the patient’s every move as the walls of the psychiatric ward come to life in a visually stunning multi-media theatrical experience of Shakespeare’s notorious tale of desire, ambition and the supernatural.
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April 21, 2013
It’s hard enough for a couple to simulate sex onstage in front of 1,000 people. Now put them in a Shakespeare tragedy. OK, now to make it really hard: Remove one of the actors.
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April 21, 2013
“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?” cries Macbeth, when told of his wife’s worsening mental health. The answer is no, and in this radical one-man re-imagining of Shakespeare’s great tragedy, the illness is more widespread still. Arriving in a foreboding psychiatric unit, seemingly after some violent breakdown, Alan Cumming plays a man possessed by every character in “Macbeth.” In a sad, emotionally draining and bravura perf, he makes it seem as if every psychosis and hallucination in the play is an expression of one man’s fragile state of mind.
READ THE REVIEWApril 21, 2013
The act of reinterpreting the Shakespearean canon has become as traditional as the plays themselves. But you will never see a Macbeth quite like the virtually one-man version that Scottish actor Alan Cumming is performing through June 30 on Broadway (following engagements at the National Theatre of Scotland and NYC’s Lincoln Center Theater).
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April 21, 2013
Alan Cumming puts a daring new spin on Shakespeare’s tragedy, shifting its focus from the cost of ambition to the harrowing imprisonment of madness.
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April 21, 2013
In others ways, however, the production, from the National Theater of Scotland, lays on the macabre trappings thickly. The cello-heavy music by Max Richter adds ominous underscoring. Three video monitors hanging above the stage flash black-and-white videos (drawn from security cameras swiveling about like snakes) to magnify Mr. Cumming’s face as his features transform themselves, signifying a transition between two characters. Banquo’s ghost causes a jolt of terror by stalking onstage wearing a full-face leather mask, his corporeality all the more striking since we seem to be in the realm of one man’s “horrible imaginings.”
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