Word: brutuses
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Watson's weakest moment is unfortunately his most famous one, when he addresses the Roman plebs at Caesar's funeral in the Forum. Here he lacks sincerity and sonority. The crowd, however, handles itself rather effectively in this scene, emitting a susurrus of suspense before Brutus' harangue, and erupting into noisy iterations of a metrically unison spondee-anapest pattern before Mark Antony...
Paul Sparer's blunt and pragmatic Cassius is fine in the first half of the play, but degenerates into overwrought fustian towards the end. In his quarrel with Brutus before Philippi, his low delivery of "Brutus, bait not not me," with shaking knee, is ten times more powerful than all the torrent of screaming and bellowing he soon gives vent...
...Brutus' young page Lucius is the only character Shakespeare did not find in Plutarch, and he was invented chiefly to illustrate Brutus' considerateness of others. Fifteen-year-old Alan Howard plays him ardently and appealingly. When he falls asleep in the midst of singing and plucking his harp, Brutus affectionately covers him with a gown. When, after the battle at Philippi, Lucius is carried in, lain on the ground and tenderly shrouded in a blanket, one is more moved than by the death of any of the play's principals...
...down here and there during the play. There is nothing wrong with stylized settings, but to have players point to these batches of vertical rods and call them a "tent" is carrying license too far. Armstrong has clothed the cast in the standard togas, loincloths, and military tunics. Since Brutus and Cassius are not only brothers-in-law but also foils to each other, Armstrong has taken care always to garb them similarly but in different colors...
Conrad Susa's incidental music is mostly just a series of sound effects. When Caesar's ghost appears to Brutus, Tharon Musser's eerie lighting makes it quite unnecessary to add the off-stage roll on the cymbal. And must we have another crude cymbal roll when Brutus runs on his sword? As a background to the aura of death at Philippi, Susa has also introduced on the harp an ostinato pattern from the Dies irae plainchant, which recalls the identical ostinato near the end of Rachmaninoff's tone-poem Isle of the Dead. At any rate, I suspect that...