Word: macbeth
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Macbeth (produced by Maurice Evans in association with John Haggott) may at last pay its way on Broadway. Actors from E. H. Sothern and Robert B. Mantell to Lionel Barrymore and Philip Merivale have wrestled with its intractable horrors, have never made them popular. The blood-soaked tale of its towering, ambition-haunted criminals gets in places too much beyond human size to be fully communicable in the theater. The raging fevers of its hero's mind somehow strike cold upon the hearer's heart. But last week Actor Maurice Evans and Director Margaret Webster...
...broad or even Shakespearean Scots the witches talked, but operatic Italian. They hailed him as "Macbetto, di Glamis Sire! . . . Macbetto, di Candor Sire! . . . Macbetto, di Scozia Re!". He was Macbeth, Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, King of Scotland-and hero of the opera by Giuseppe Verdi which was last given in Manhattan in 1850. This Mediterranean Macbeth, revived by Mrs. Lytle Hull's New Opera Company (TIME, Oct. 27), made a stirring music drama. Able Fritz Busch conducted...
...present production of "Macbeth" has many things which will cause it to be remembered as a great presentation of Shakespeare. The play has been wisely divided into two acts in which the scenes follow swiftly upon each other so that there is no loss of the power of the tragedy. This is made possible by a striking and very usable staging and by the use of music during the interludes of acting. This music was at first too loud and drowned some of the speeches, but that is the only large criticism of the production. To compensate for that...
...part of Macbeth, Maurice Evans brings his well-known talents and gives an energetic, dynamic presentation of the king, but he is often too tense to give the illusion of reality. His passions are towering but never quite convincing. On the other hand. Judith Anderson, in the equally difficult role of Lady Macbeth, the highly ambitions but not naturally bloodthirsty queen, has a quality of realism that Evans lacks. The passionate scenes where she goads Macberth on to his crimes and reviles him for his weakness, are topped off by the famous sleep-walk ag scene, which is played with...
From Glyndebourne, too, came the New Opera's conductor of last week-hulking, moon-faced German Fritz Busch. This week the New Opera revives Verdi's Macbeth, seldom heard in the U.S. since 1850. Other revivals: Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame, whose lush melodies and story of a gambler's fate have pleased European but not U.S. audiences, and La Vie Parisienne -Offenbach's satire on the gaslit vulgarities of France's Second Empire...