As
an actor onstage, Ethan Hawke has a
certain scruffy appeal that lends itself to roles of early dissolution or
immature academia, with a wry attitude (he has, for example, acquitted himself
passably assaying some Chekhov roles at the CSC off-Broadway, which provides
the kind of close quarters that don’t perforce require grandeur or scope)…but
he is patently, palpably and transparently without the skill set, or indeed the
attention-demanding magnetism for a role like Macbeth. Even vocally, he’s too limited for
Shakespeare, being one of those performers who hasn’t the technique for musical
gradation, and so he just has levels of tight-throated intensity that become
more strident as he cranks up his emotive style into the inevitable manic rush
of words that stands in for the ‘A’ conditions of anger, anguish and ass-hat
madness—all of which have the ‘A’ quality of awfulness.
It’s
very hard to be fair to the redoubtable director Jack O’Brien’s production with that at the center. It seems very
capably cast—with such stalwarts as Brian D’Arcy-James, Byron Jennings, Malcolm Gets, John Glover and Anne-Marie
Duff—and the staging mostly
standard-issue professional, without too much in the way of superimposed
filters of time and place (including those that may be accurate). It’s even
hard to judge the notion of the witches played by men in drag who double as
minor characters along the way. On the one hand, it provides a serious challenge for a calibre of
character man who wouldn’t normally touch passing roles (we’re talking of
Jennings, Glover and Gets here), meant, I suppose, to put forth the dramatic
conceit that the witches are omniscient because they are, in fact, constant
observers. But in the service of supporting a lead actor whose interpretation
comes off as cranky and coked up rather than haunted, any such device can only
seem like an experiment in drag techniques, for the simple reason that, in such
a classical context, the lead actor sets the manner of perspective the audience
is willing to grant. (Sidebar: In the wake of the recent live Sound of Music
broadcast, a Facebook friend commented how, for him, the 1967 ABC
network broadcast of Carousel was the standard-bearer
against which he held any TV adaptation of a Broadway musical. I did a little
quick web-browsing to see if I could locate a grey market bootleg—which I
did, they’re not hard to find—and along the way discovred that his was
not a singular appraisal. Upon watching it, I discovered why. It came just as
incorporating what I’ll liberally allow as “naturalistic” values started to
enter the realm of musical theatre acting, and it was probably the first time
such an approach informed the treatment of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical in
a major venue—and was also probably, in its era, a little daring and
edgy. And the tone is set by Robert Goulet’s Billy Bigelow. He backphrases and sprechstimmes like crazy, and the phrasing would seem like the
excesses of a practiced lounge-lizard except for one vital thing: the come from
his level of being connected and committed to the reality and the emotional
truth of every single moment. He even—forgive me for saying
so—solves a few credibility-stretching emotional/transitional leaps in
the songs—moments that you previously allowed as poetic license, rather
than truly believed in—by finding phrasings that, without distorting the
material or pulling it out of shape, quickly and efficiently convey the intermediate
emotional steps that justify the next extreme. This remarkable—I can only
call it anchoring, for it sets a foundation—is reflected back in all the
performances around him [in particular Mary Grover’s Julie Jordan, who manages
to stay conversational in a high soprano range with a preternatural ease that
is just perfect for the intimacy of the TV screen]. None of the others take
Goulet’s type of liberties with the score, of course, they hew much more to
what’s precisely on the musical page…but they’re in a gestalt lockstep as far as delivering the verisimilitude of
people talking to one another [or
themselves] despite that they’re really singing. So much so that when the
production numbers roll around, most of them rendered with a high cornball quotient, you forgive the excess. And to
bring us back to Shakespeare, that quality of mercy comes from the feeling that
you’re in good hands and will be returning to truthful interaction at any
moment. It’s a stunning achievement.)
And
next to the example set by something like that, how how how is one to take this
Macbeth seriously?
I
recently read a short article about this production, the angle of which was
that for a mounting of Macbeth, it was
uncharacteristically free of being plagued by the play’s traditional backstage
misfortunes.
Maybe
the mischievous fates knew when enough was enough…
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