Alan Cumming's one-man production of Macbeth lands on Broadway. The National Theatre of Scotland's production of MACBETH was performed last summer at the Lincoln Center Festival. Tony Award-winning actor Alan Cumming's virtuoso performance is a bold reimagining of Shakespeare's chilling tale of desire, ambition, and the supernatural.
The production is set in a psychiatric unit and centers on a patient who is reliving the story of Macbeth. CCTV cameras watch the patient's every move and the clinical walls of the unit come to life in a visually stunning multi-media theatrical experience.
The Scottish actor, now best known as the cunning political operative Eli Gold on TV's 'The Good Wife,' brings an authentic burr to the role along with several terabytes of memory. The production, which opened last summer's Lincoln Center Festival (where it wasn't eligible for Tony Award nominations) struck me as even more gimmicky on second viewing. It reveals more about the actor than the would-be king.
...the Tony-winning Good Wife star acts out a streamlined version of the drama, playing nearly all of the characters himself...The result is mesmerizing theater, aided enormously by Natasha Chivers' lighting and Fergus O'Hare's creepy horror-movie sound design. But as conceived by Cumming with co-directors John Tiffany (Once) and Andrew Goldberg (The Bomb-itty of Errors), it's also less a true revival of Macbeth than a wickedly clever riff on themes from Macbeth...Indeed, the stunt-like nature of the production sometimes muffles the play's emotional impact-we wind up feeling more for Cumming as a performer than we do for the characters he portrays...But what a tour-de-force performance it is. B+
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Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
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2013 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Sound Design in a Play | Fergus O'Hare |
2013 | Drama League Awards | Distinguished Performance Award | Alan Cumming |
2013 | Drama League Awards | Distinguished Revival of a Broadway or Off-Broadway Play | 0 |
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