THEATER & MUSEUM

Park Avenue Armory
Macbeth - Shakespeare

We had a treat today at MOMA.  We arrived before general opening time and members were allowed to go into the collection. We went immediately to the 5th floor where the greatest concentration of "museum" pieces are and had it literally all to ourselves.  There was NO ONE there except the guards and us.  It was a private museum for about an hour.

"Shakespeare’s classic tale of ambition and treachery gets a thrilling new life in the U.S. premiere of the electrifying production by Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh, following its acclaimed sold-out run at the Manchester International Festival in England. Kenneth Branagh, in his first Shakespeare performance in more than a decade, is joined by Alex Kingston, in their highly-anticipated New York stage debuts, as the once great leader and his adored wife, who incites him to sell his soul in the quest for greater power.

Utilizing the Armory’s unique space and military history, this audacious staging brings to life one of Shakespeare’s most powerful tragedies in an intensely physical, fast-paced production that places the audience directly on the sidelines of battle. Blood, sweat, and the elements of nature can be directly felt as the action unfurls across a traverse stage, with heaven beckoning at one end and hell looming at the other."



Macbeth at the Park Armory was a two hour descent triggered by greed into complete destruction with no relief.  The setting was such that the actors, the play, and the battle were close enough to throw mud into our laps.  It was Shakespeare in a Disney World setting.  My concern was, "Would we be able to hear the words?" We heard every word in a room big enough to hold an indoor track meet.

Celebrity sightings: Rudy Giuliani, Ben Stiller, and Glenn Close.

THEATER | THEATER REVIEW

Rushing Headlong Into the Hurly-Burly

A Fast and Furious ‘Macbeth’ at Park Avenue Armory

By BEN BRANTLEYJUNE 5, 2014

Macbeth Kenneth Branagh, center, in the title role in a production by him and Rob Ashford that opened on Thursday at the Park Avenue Armory.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Hearts beat fast in the thrilling new “Macbeth” that has transformed the Park Avenue Armory into a war zone, and every breath starts to feel like a gasp. Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh’s galloping British-born production, which opened on Thursday night with Mr. Branagh in the title role, saturates everyone in it in adrenaline. Make that everyone watching it, as well.

This is the summer blockbuster that we wait for every year and too seldom find at the multiplexes, one of those action-packed, spectacle-drenched shows that sweep you right into their fraught, churning worlds and refuse to release you until the lights come up — and maybe not even then. Of course, the dialogue here is a bit richer than that of films inspired by comic books. But it’s also a whole lot tastier, and there’s not a line spoken that doesn’t seem to have grown organically from the wicked hurly-burly on the stage.

Once you do catch your breath and can think calmly about what you’ve seen, you’ll realize with how much care and intelligence this production has been assembled. But it’s your viscera that dictate your responses while you’re watching, and you have no alternative but to ride the speeding, jolting juggernaut that is this “Macbeth” until it finally lets you off after two intermissionless hours.

A similar lack of choice plagues Macbeth, the ambitious but ambivalent Scottish thane, and his lusty wife, Lady Macbeth (Alex Kingston). Once they’ve started on their path to power and the grave by murdering their king to claim his crown, there’s no way that things could happen other than they do.

But this production, like no other I’ve seen, translates that sense of inevitability into sensory terms, and we start to feel the anxious resignation of being swept up in a crowd that keeps moving forward en masse. The deluxe design team for “Macbeth” — which includes Christopher Oram (set and costumes) and Neil Austin (lighting) — has conjured a world that feels as lonely and immense as a blasted heath and as confining as a mausoleum.

The actual playing area is modeled after the 19th-century deconsecrated church in Manchester, England, where I first saw this “Macbeth” (as part of the Manchester International Festival) last summer. Once again, there is a central aisle between tiers of benches that turn the audience into a cross between guilty churchgoers and prurient spectators at a bullfight. And once again, there is a chancel at one end, with an altar ablaze with devotional candles.

But Mr. Oram has scaled up his original designs and, free of the constraints of working in an existing church, has shifted the emphasis from the ecclesiastic to the chthonic. Theatergoers herded into the Armory’s main hall (and herded they are, having been divided into seating groups with names of Scottish clans) walk a stone path toward an ominous, Stonehenge-like structure.

This is a place, you feel with the same instinct that overcomes you at the real Stonehenge or the Roman Coliseum, where blood has been spilled for purposes sacred and profane. These stones antedate even the long-ago, medieval world in which this “Macbeth” is set. And it feels right that our first glimpse of those creepy, prophetic witches (the lithely nubile Charlie Cameron, Laura Elsworthy and Anjana Vasan) should be through the columns of this structure.

 “These creatures must have come from a bubble in the earth,” says Banquo (an unexpectedly and affectingly paternal Jimmy Yuill), Macbeth’s comrade in arms and rival for the laurels of posterity. And for all its churchly imagery, this is a very earthy “Macbeth.”

The production begins in medias res: a full-throttle battle fought in the aisle between the seating areas. The floor is dark dirt, soon to be moistened by rain and blood. And throughout the show, people will grab handfuls of it, flinging it in wide arcs, as if to further besmirch the always crepuscular skies.

We also sense that the people who inhabit this ancient Scotland are not far from the primal pull of a land that has been the subject of civil wars for as long as they can remember. From the testy King Duncan (John Shrapnel) to the lowliest foot soldier, their metabolisms are set by the rhythms of combat. And they are accustomed to traveling with hyper-alertness and defensive speed among these body-strewn fields where hidden adversaries may always lurk.

That is certainly the life Macbeth has known. And Mr. Branagh (a memorable Henry V and Hamlet on film), in his first Shakespearean stage outing in more than a decade, cannily gives us a soldier who is at ease only when acting like a soldier. Though he is not without ambition, or the raw urge to rule, he needs to be commanded to tap it.

Enter the witches, who tell him there’s a throne in his future. And here comes his determined wife to make sure he turns prophecy into reality. Ms. Kingston (best known here for “E.R.,” on TV) provides a portrait of a lady of deep appetites and exposed nerves.

Her Lady Macbeth has absorbed the prevailing martial instinct — to command, to protect, to vanquish — into her undeniably sexual bond with her husband. The passions blur together in this world, and nobody has the time to stand still and sort them out.

Mr. Branagh delivers the early monologues of vacillation, as Macbeth contemplates regicide, with the briskness of a military mind that must clear itself of obstacles. And because he is closeting up his doubts and fears, his subsequent eruptions into madness, when words abruptly morph into howls, have a harrowing logic.

This actor doesn’t milk the soliloquies as flashy set pieces; they always exist in the context of the moment. And when he finally arrives at the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech, it’s in a drained and defeated voice. It’s the one time in the play that Macbeth allows himself to see clearly, and because he now has, we know he’s a goner.

Seeing clearly, of course, isn’t easy in a world of endless night. And Mr. Austin’s lighting summons shadows pregnant with menace — all the characters keep looking over their shoulders to make sure they’re alone — and with dreams that take on flesh. Mr. Ashford uses his experience as a celebrated director of musicals to stunning, time-bending effect here, in sequences that include a funeral that turns into a coronation and a mesmerizing procession of royal apparitions.

The cast, which includes some welcome new additions, is even stronger than it was when I saw “Macbeth” in Manchester. Everybody is marching to the same spectral drummer here, and everybody keeps both anger and fear close to the surface.

The good guys in “Macbeth” are generally bores and stiffs. But Richard Coyle is a compellingly fierce Macduff (another natural-born soldier), and Alexander Vlahos plays the boy-king-to-be Malcolm with a tremulous vulnerability that makes you worry about Scotland’s future. I even enjoyed the drunken Porter (Tom Godwin), often a tedious lout, who here emerges as a sour and sullied creature, the jester that his time deserves.

As for those witches, they keep popping up all over — occasionally levitating (hey, they’re witches), but also scurrying about and giggling, like wicked little gargoyle girls determined to make mischief among the oafish, self-destructive grown-ups. And how they seem to enjoy the bloody fruits of their labors. These Weird Sisters are having the time of their eternal lives. In that regard, you’ll find it hard not to identify with them.