On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage SHAKESPEARE IN SHAMBLES by leo sauvage A JL JL ccording to Playbill, Herbert Senn and Helen Pond have designed sets for opera producer and symphonic conductor Sarah Caldwell in "a...
...The scenes with the witches around the acrobatically stylized cauldron might then be considered imaginative musical staging, a little on the avant-garde side...
...Lennox then points to the chair and says: "Here'saplacereserv'd, sir...
...And afterward: "Re-enter Macduff, with Macbeth's head...
...The problem is that Caldwell does not exploit the dramatic possibilities of that chair...
...She starts with a good idea: the table is placed perpendicular to the audience, giving the scene great visual impact as well as concentrating the attention on Macbeth's empty chair at the far end...
...For even when the upper part of the bridge is hidden by a black curtain, the incongruous 19th-century arch supporting it remains visible...
...To seduce him, Venus uses gestures that do not belong to a Western theme and are even less appropriate to Roman-Greek mythology...
...the other told me that he does sit in it, but very briefly...
...I called two friends who had seen the Lincoln Center production...
...Still, given the boiling cauldron and the "brinded cat" and "fillet of a fenny snake," we need some hint of an explanation for the credulity of the Scottish nobleman and his wife...
...That is not all...
...as adding some spice to an operaticAfoc-beth...
...Shakespeare specifically wants Macbeth to see the chair with somebody in it...
...With the help of B.H...
...Macbeth could be terrorized either by a visible ghost several steps away or by an empty stool where he imagines seeing him...
...On Stage SHAKESPEARE IN SHAMBLES by leo sauvage A JL JL ccording to Playbill, Herbert Senn and Helen Pond have designed sets for opera producer and symphonic conductor Sarah Caldwell in "a series of nontheaters, including a hockey rink, athletic cages, gymnasiums, Boston's glass-domed cyclorama, and...
...Because of Sarah Caldwell's previous work, it may seem too easy to speak of her having staged Macbeth like an opera...
...though I personally would not like it...
...Alarums...
...Thus the arch becomes part of the ceiling of Macbeth's banquet hall...
...But a murder under a bridge is less baffling than an 11th-century ghost appearing in front of a structure that could pass for an enlarged detail of the Eiffel Tower...
...Caldwell nevertheless uses it as a vaulted passageway leading to the private chambers in Macbeth's castle, or as part of some crenelated battlements where attackers cross swords with defenders...
...I mention Senn and Pond first because theirs is the most damaging contribution to Caldwell's depressing production...
...Although the atmosphere is neither Shakespearian nor that of a real cabaret, the show is called Shakespeare's Cabaret, and it is sometimes pleasing...
...During the play a big, steep staircase is pushed in from stage right and connected to one end of the overpass...
...No, this is indeed not a memorable production of Macbeth...
...both situations cannot prevail at the same time...
...But that was for a good reason: The ghost was portrayed as a ghost??that is, Macbeth addressed an empty chair where he alone saw the spirit sitting...
...Philip Anglim has his good moments as Macbeth...
...Adonis appears as a cowboy...
...The show has other satisfying moments, but I would not include among them the longish and somewhat pompous mythological "ballet" called "Venus and Adonis Suite," subtitled "An Erotic Narrative Poem...
...Meant for King Duncan's ceremonious ascent to the bedroom where he will be murdered, it becomes a real hazard for the actors who have to rush down those steps for various purposes...
...The three weird sisters talk about the past, the present and the future...
...Yet why should Macbeth be transfixed with terror while looking at the stool when no ghost is there...
...So nothing is necessarily lost here by taking some liberties...
...Shakespeare's directions are: "Exeunt, fighting...
...they clearly are related to the three "Fates" found in Nordic as well as in Greek and Roman mythology...
...When Ross asks him to take his place, Macbeth answers: "The table's full...
...There is rhythm and movement here, and if it is not exactly Shakespeare, it is good cabaret...
...She is less meticulous when it comes to the playwright's other instructions, not to mention his intentions...
...It serves, too, as a pathway for the procession of the eight kings who represent SARAH CALDWELL "Banquo's issue" as conjured by the witches for Macbeth...
...Catherine Cox, Patti Perkins and Pau-lette Pearson??sing "All that glitters," from The Merchant of Venice...
...Thinking back, I could only remember an empty chair, and the ghost moving aimlessly about the table...
...Shakespeare says that when Ban-quo's ghost enters, he "sits in Macbeth's place...
...True, the killings ordered by Macbeth are supposed to take place in Mac-duffs castle, and the sharply delineated zones of darkness at the rear and on stage left rather suggest they are being carried out on the embankment of a river...
...Later on, an angular Nevelson-type enclosed winding stairway is shoved to the middle of the bridge to allow for Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking...
...Yet this is an important detail that should not be open to such ambiguous impressions...
...Only Maureen Anderman as Lady Macbeth is distinctly above average, except when Caldwell has her repeat "To bed...
...Fathers that wear rags," UomKingLear, is a quite powerful blues number...
...It certainly adds nothing to Shakespeare's legitimate one...
...Well, the former management of the Vivian Beaumont Theater did worse a few years ago, when it presented Richard Foreman's destructive, farcical treatment of Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera...
...Mulcahy successfully adapts the Bard's involuntary contributions to a variety of musical styles, showingapref-erence for the paradoxical...
...jL t the Bijou Theater, three young men and three young women...
...It can be said about the cast that it is all right, not muchmore...
...It is a strange concoction, and along with the often too sugary or, as critic Spiro Agnew would say, "effete" aspects of JohnDriver'sdirectionandLynneTay-lor-Corbett's choreography, represents the negative side of Shakespeare's Cabaret...
...Caldwell shows us Banquo's ghost, mostly wandering around...
...the East Room of the White House...
...Yet that would be the most charitable treatment of her blunder...
...The fact that one of the three witches is a man using two voices could be applauded...
...After Macduff re-enters, they simply have him pointing to the wings when he invites Malcolm to behold "th'usurper's cursed head...
...One said that the ghost stands behind the chair for a moment...
...for half a minute in three different places on the railroad overpass...
...And Macbeth asks: "Where...
...Almost all the action is overshadowed??in a very physical sense??by a narrow, metallic-looking bridge that reminds us of a railroad overpass for pedestrians...
...If other directors tend to have the fight finished offstage as indicated, like Caldwell they usually prefer to forget about the severed head...
...With " If music be the food of love," the composer seems willing to approximate the way Orsino might might express his desperate love for Olivia at the beginning of a musical version of Twelfth Night...
...I am not complaining about her having Macbeth killed by Macduff onstage...
...no witches??sing two dozen songs written by Australian composer Lance Mul-cahy, who has drawn his verses from various works by Shakespeare...
...In a maneuver that further diminishes the dramatic impact of the scene, Caldwell has the specter vanish through the table, which opens for him as the Red Sea did for Moses...
...Perhaps most effective of all is a sequence early in the evening where the three women in the cast...
...Barry, who is billed as "Fight Director," Caldwell appears, however, to have spent most of her energy carrying out with a maximum of noise and intensity every "alarum" and "flourish" in the script...
...His Epitaph, for instance, comes out like a traditional Broadway finale...
...Despite all their mumbo jumbo, the witches are not intended merely to provide some fanciful interludes...
...There is one scene in which this dominant piece of stage design appears fitting, albeit not very Shakespearean: the murder of Lady Macduff and her children...
...Much is spoiled, though, by the way Caldwell interprets the staging called for in the banquet scene...
...Unfortunately, they have also designed the sets for her debut as a legitimate stage director with Macbeth, the new Lincoln Center Theater Company's second offering at the Vivian Beaumont Theater...
...Shakespeare has them call themselves the "weird sisters," and any good dictionary tells us that "weird" comes from the Anglo-Saxon "wyrd," meaning "fate...
...You look but on a stool, says Lady Macbeth...
...Again, there have been other productions??the first one in 1794 at the new Drury Lane??where no ghost was sitting "in Macbeth's place...
...Entirely out of place, the bridge fails to suggest any connection with an 1 lth-century castle, if only because it has no hint of stone...
Vol. 64 • February 1981 • No. 4
