Macbeth
Opening Night: April 21, 2022
Theater: Longacre Theatre
Website: macbethbroadway.com
This spring, Daniel Craig (No Time to Die, A Steady Rain) makes his much-anticipated return to Broadway alongside Ruth Negga (Passing, Hamlet), making her Broadway debut, in this world premiere production of Shakespeare’s heart-racing drama Macbeth, directed by Tony Award® winner Sam Gold (Hamlet, Othello, Fun Home). 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.
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April 29, 2022
Despite the star power of Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, the overthought production that opened on Thursday at the Longacre Theater seems unsure of its welcome, as if a classic that has enjoyed nearly 50 Broadway revivals since 1768 might no longer find an audience willing to meet it halfway.
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April 29, 2022
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.
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April 29, 2022
This Scottish play is no “King Lear” as misdirected by Gold. Then again, the director doesn’t equal here his radical, insightful interpretations of Shakespeare as seen with his “Hamlet” at the Public Theater in 2017, starring Oscar Isaac, or his “Othello” at New York Theatre Workshop in 2017, starring David Oyelowo and Craig.
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April 29, 2022
Even if one has mixed feelings about this production, it’s nice just to be back at a point where there is once again a Shakespeare play on Broadway, with a big star and a strong cast, that is doing sell-out business, and has an offbeat production concept.
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April 29, 2022
Gold’s production strips “Macbeth” of context, but does not functionally wrestle with the timeless stuff that’s left. There’s not much revealed here about the folly of avarice, or why it makes people crazy. The most human thing onstage is gobs of spilled blood, gushing from a slit throat and poured into the witches’ stew, or staining the skin and robes of the killers and the damned. It’s a grizzly and unearned grasp for thrills from a production without a cohesive life force of its own.
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April 29, 2022
Having seen Macbeth in everything from period-perfect unabridged versions to Alan Cumming’s one-man tour-de-force, to interpretive dance adaptations, I find this production exhilarating. But it’s not the best introduction to the play for someone who’s unfamiliar with the text, and as theatre artists, we certainly cannot sacrifice clarity for innovation.
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April 29, 2022
Uneven – if not so much as Gold’s 2019 King Lear with Glenda Jackson – and peppered with choices both curious (what, no “double double toil and trouble?”) and captivating (a brief prologue that’s as funny as it is timely), this iteration of The Scottish Play, which opened last night at the Longacre Theatre, nearly holds up to the unavoidable hype of its starry cast.
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April 29, 2022
While humans do indeed contain multitudes, a partially deconstructed Macbeth is intriguing, enlightening, but also confusing. Act one feels scattered, while act two feels richer textually, rooted in characters finally given the space to speak and marshal the text and mounting tragedy.
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April 29, 2022
Perhaps we should have taken a hint from the production’s marketing, which prominently features the names of the stars and director while Shakespeare’s is nowhere to be seen. In retrospect, that seems appropriate, since this is far more Sam Gold’s Macbeth than the Bard’s.
READ THE REVIEWApril 29, 2022
I won’t say I felt completely satisfied (for that, give me a truly kickass Macbeth-Macduff fight). But I was entertained, and heard some great language spoken by legends of my time. And evil, in the end, was defeated. I think.
READ THE REVIEWApril 29, 2022
In the end, this Macbeth is a star-enhanced hodgepodge. It’s filled with some sound, some fury, and many question marks.
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April 29, 2022
Witches, regicide, beheadings and descents into madness are made as boring and convoluted as “Quantum of Solace.”
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April 29, 2022
This Macbeth hovers in a fog of confusion from beginning to end, which features the actors chowing down on soup as they stare out at the hungry and irritated crowd. I’m still not sure what it means, and I suspect I’m not meant to. Perhaps some people will walk away thinking they’re just not clever enough to get it – an old ruse in the theater, but perhaps too ambitious a vault here.
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April 29, 2022
Under all the fog (and there is a lot of it), there isn’t much substance in this production, which clearly prioritizes an aesthetic and a mood over acting, coherence and Shakespeare’s text.
READ THE REVIEWApril 29, 2022
Gold’s production simply lacks narrative drive. You cannot get fully invested in an evening spent pondering Macbeth’s narrative psyche if you don’t comprehend the world. The Gold outer play is trackable to a point (by the end, it seems like this troop of actors are actually refugees from somewhere, passing the time in limbo), but he is so busy setting the play off at a remove, in building a competing absurdist narrative, he forgets at times to actually do the play, or so it feels.
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April 29, 2022
The Macbeths are chilling at the start of arthe play—the couple, laidback on a couch upstage as a man is hung upside-down, are both relaxed and off-putting. Played by Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, they’re a frighteningly attractive pair, resting on their absolute command of an audience’s attention. They deserve it, too, though director Sam Gold’s production does everything it can to take it away from them, through a series of hyper-modern, hyper-lax choices that turn the heat all the way down on Shakespeare’s iconic tale of despair and bloodlust.
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