Word: macbeths
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Posthumous but prescient comments on the Met's new Macbeth...
...Hamlet or MacBeth, by William Shakespeare...
Although the 15 symphonies are his best-known works, it is likely that a truer portrait of the composer is to be found in the quartets. After Shostakovich's daring opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was denounced in the pages of Pravda as "muddle instead of music," he apologized with the Fifth Symphony (1937), a "creative reply to just criticism." Censured by a Communist Party resolution of 1948 for "formalistic distortions and antidemocratic tendencies," Shostakovich wrote two of his next three symphonies about the Russian Revolution. But these works were for official consumption; spiritually, Shostakovich went underground to express...
...rights, this play, like Antony and Cleopatra, should have a double title-something like Macbeth and Wife or Two on the Heath-for Lady Macbeth is fully as important as her husband. Hamlet can get along with a second-rate Ophelia, but if the actress who plays Lady Macbeth is inadequate, or just barely good, the entire play suffers accordingly. That, in brief, is what is wrong with Nicol Williamson's production, which opened at Manhattan's Circle in the Square last week. Andrea Weber may be a gifted young actress, but she is definitely...
...match for Williamson, who plays her partner in murder. His Macbeth is skittery and jittery, a neurotic who seems to be in the midst of an identity crisis. It is a fascinating interpretation, which appears to owe something to Richard Nixon, and Williamson manages to make the familiar sound fresh and exciting. In the "Tomorrow" speech, for example, his words come out in spurts, as if they were spoken by a madman, which by that point Macbeth very nearly is. Weber, by contrast, is always predictable, and she seems to know only one way to make a point-loudly...