Word: bsc
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...scene and the production, work for a simple and well-precedented reason--lack of interference. In the last year or so the BSC has done a fair amount of experimenting with the different ways a director can mangle a script in the interests of originally; their director's Romeo and Juliet was set mysteriously and superfluously in modern-day Belfast, and Bill Coe's Memlet offered the truly creative line-reading "To be, or not?... To be!" But now the fever seems to have broken. Caesar, which will run repertory with Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, demonstrates...
After an all-too-obvious identity crisis and a period of physical confusion--occasioned by the move this fall from near Symphony Hall to the wilds of St. Botolph Street--the BSC appears to have come home just in time to face a new adjustment. Peter Sellars '80, not hitherto known for sticking exactly to original milieus, will take over the company's directorship after the current season ends; whatever his plans, though, he is fortunate to be meeting up with a group whose feet, at long last, seem to have regained contact with the theatrical ground. The Tragedy...
Coupling the two shows is by no means unheard of, and one director recently combined the two into a six-hour marathon. It is still a winning combination, carried out smoothly by the BSC. Most of the cast is identical for the two shows, with the disappointing exception of Hamlet himself, and selected routines evoke one show in the midst of another--notably, the first entrance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet, in which the two, with more snap and individuality than such small parts would otherwise command, silently go through one of Stoppard's coin-flipping routines...
...some fine moments (a giddy Macbeth sprawling pitifully on the ground while plotting Banquo's death), the stylization produces tiresome histrionics (Macbeth: "O! full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife." Macbeth clutches head, presumable to show us scorpions) redolent of countless mediocre productions of Shakespeare. Most of the BSC actors lack the intensity to pull...
...BSC has heretofore restricted itself largely to the comedies, which might account for the lack of emotional clout which mars the acting in this production. (We should at least give the company credit for attempting such a dark work, something the American Repertory Theater has yet to do.) Performances begin to fray at the edges of the company: Lloyd Morris portrays a terribly sappy Malcolm, and Henry Woronicz as Banquo has too much of that Ewell Gibbons pleasantness to be credible in this nuthouse. The weird sisters, too, seem strangely mundane, more like a couple of Cockney flower girls...