Word: macbeth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...company. "The only way an actor grows," she has learned, "is by playing role after role after role, and not in two-year runs. Repertory theater is great for actors because they're allowed to fail. I should have the chance to fail atrociously as Lady Macbeth right now. Then maybe I could do St. Joan...
Jason Robards, Jr. has the central role of Quentin, surely one of the longest in all drama. Robards' work in the past has varied from a transcendent Hickey in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh to an abysmal attempt at Macbeth. But here he is playing at his best--a performance of enormous power and rich detail. At first I felt his diction was too monochromatic. But the wisdom of this became apparent when he burst forth later in the argument over tattling to Congress, or reacted to the news of Lou's suicide, or carried on the climactic battle...
...with zany astrologers of the marketplace-hack writers, foxy talent agents, dubbed-in laugh effects men-who cast horoscopes under the sign of the dollar to see if the public will prefer the TV story of a myna bird that refuses to talk or a chimpanzee that plays Lady Macbeth. The dialogue is more quippish than witty, but the hip mass-media-men-at-work lingo scatters the laughs over an occasional drab patch of script. The life of the play is in the instinctive mendacity of its con-man hero. The Albatross flies where Sammy Glick once...
Whenever Joseph Stalin saw an opera that wasn't Eugene Onegin he went home mad, but rarely as mad as he was the night he saw Dmitry Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. "Gnashing and screeching, crude, primitive, vulgar," Pravda roared, having prudently reconsidered a published opinion that called the opera "a triumph" after its 1934 debut two years before. Shostakovich withdrew the opera, and off and on over the years, he set to work at revision...
...choice since the title characters were both treated by Shakespeare. But where is this to end? Shall we in future find them putting on Kiss Me, Kate and The Boys From Syracuse? And then Elmer Rice's Hamlet-based Cue for Passion, with afternoon showings of the movie Joe Macbeth...