Word: macbeth
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Buttons to Fix. By the time Garrick reached fame, the English stage was in a condition of happy disorder. Shakespeare's plays had been murderously rewritten; King Lear had a happy ending and Macbeth had been refitted with low-comedy witches. While one actor rumbled through his speeches, another might nod to his friends in the audience, fix his buttons or ostentatiously spit on the stage. Audiences were noisy and quarrelsome, and privileged dandies would stand in the wings loudly gossiping. Occasionally, a drunken beau would stray on to the stage to kiss the leading lady...
Parallel with the satire in The Price Is Right, Weidman tries something bigger; he appears to offer Henry Cade as a sort of modern Macbeth, a surrogate for all men gnawed by too much ambition. But Weidman's Macbeth remains strictly from Madison Avenue, and one side of the street at that...
...Hall, composed her hands and began to sing. Her voice, ranging from a mellow low contralto to a brilliant mezzo-soprano, glided through songs by Gluck, Haydn, Schubert, Rossini, Mahler, Ravel and De-Falla; the performance came to an end with the Sleep-Walking Scene from Verdi's Macbeth. The audience shuffled their programs to look at the name again. Thirtyish Elena Nikolaidi, making her U.S. debut and almost unknown outside Athens and Vienna, had achieved one of the smash hits of the season...
Shakespeare's Macbeth is a turbulent melodrama, full of spooky claptrap, but its central figure gives it the dignity of classic tragedy. Welles has kept the claptrap, but his Macbeth is no once-honorable soldier whose muddled aspirations trap him into a crime against himself (the murder of King Duncan, in the play, also destroys the murderer's ability to live with himself). Orson has robbed the play of tragic impact by substituting a conniving heel who kills as he climbs...
Orson's fascination with the echoes of his own voice on the sound track (a hangover from Citizen Kane) sometimes makes his Macbeth resemble an unmannerly uproar in a coal mine. The on-again-off-again use of a Scotch burr by some of the actors, including the star, does not help; but the production's main fault is that Welles and his leading lady (Jeanette Nolan) play their roles, for most of 95 minutes, at the top of their lungs...