Saturday Matinee

Today's performance of Macbeth is at 3:00 at the West Side Theater.  Plenty of time to digest your lunch and get here, see the show and be home in time for evening repast.  Come on down for an afternoon of murder, mayhem and magic. . .

I case you'd like a refresher before they come out to watch the actors hitting the boards. . . .Not broads, silly.  Boards.  The stage! . . .  Uploaded below is a Sparks Notes graphic novel- style synopsis of the play(Cliffs Notes is turning their guides into animated videos.  But that's still on the horizon.)

Enjoy!

Video SparkNotes: Shakespeare's Macbeth summary

Next year Cliff's Notes are being turned into video.  They're not available yet, but Sparks has these graphic novel notes on YouTube.   In case you would like a pre-show rundown of the story -- here you go!

Elizabethan Theatre

A small treat by way of YouTube -- a play goes up at the Globe.  As you dress to go to see the ASC production of Macbeth at the West Side Theater, from now through the first of April, you can imagine you will see it at Shakespeare's Globe.

Lady Macbeth -- a man playing a woman becoming a man?

Sometime around the Sixth Century B.C., when theater was ritualized, women were banned from the stage and were almost universally prohibited from performing in Western Europe until 1660.  So Lady Macbeth, like all the great Shakespearean roles, was written for a man.

In one of her most dramatic moments, Lady Macbeth pleads, "Come, you spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full/Of direst cruelty!"suggesting that cruelty and "thick blood" are characteristics only attributable to a man.


In order to spur her husband to bloody murder, she must become the man within her and eschew her softer instincts lest he be inclined to be somewhat womanlike and consequently afraid of action.

The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry 'Hold, hold!'

"Macbeth" - Dench/McKellen -1979, Trevor Nunn, Dir.

Scenes from Macbeth

To whet the appetite for The ASC production of Macbeth opening tonight and running through April 1 at the West Side Theater, we chose The Thane of Glamis and Thane of Cawdor Macbeth's single most famous soliloquy and chose two outstanding actors' renditions to present to you here.

The differences are in the nuances, and each illuminates a slightly different Macbeth, a Macbeth with singular perspective on life.  Take a look.  Which is the Macbeth that most closely resembles the Macbeth you envision?

Then come to the theater, and hear Michael Basile's take on the speech.  Half the fun of seeing a Shakespeare play is hearing what you have heard a hundred times done just differently enough that you can hear what you never heard in the speech before.  Somewhere in this monologue,  you will realize that Basile's take has opened a curtain and has shed light on an aspect of the character or the play or/and on your perception of life itself that you had not examined before.

Ian McKellen as Macbeth ("Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow")