"Despite the star power of Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, the overthought production that opened on Thursday at the Longacre Theater seems unsure of its welcome, as if a classic that has enjoyed nearly 50 Broadway revivals since 1768 might no longer find an audience willing to meet it halfway."
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"One does wonder why Macbeth looks like he’s been at a fashion shoot when he’s supposedly just back from a battle. And as directed, his big speeches turn repetitious. In the end, this 'Macbeth' is a star-enhanced hodgepodge. It’s filled with some sound, some fury, and many question marks."
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"The kind of passive-aggressive theater party that invites two big stars to attend—Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga as the regicidal title couple—and then makes a point of ignoring them. Short, eloquent, violent and packed with sensational business (murder! witches! madness! ghosts! a decapitated head!), 'Macbeth' is usually one of Shakespeare’s most exciting plays. Not so here: Deliberately murky, this anemic modern-dress production creeps at a petty pace from scene to scene, to the last syllable of the tragedy’s verse and beyond into a wistful folk-song coda."
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"It’s an unusually bare staging for Broadway, stuffed with ideas but stripped clean of folderol. For the majority of the company, director Sam Gold has settled on a kind of still-in-rehearsal vibe, with big events whirling up out of an empty theater lit dimly by ghost light. Who is a witch and who is a laird in any single moment seems fluid — appropriately for a cast hamstrung repeatedly by COVID setbacks, anyone might play anyone. In contrast, Craig and Ruth Negga, as Lady Macbeth, are incontrovertibly stars, gliding across the space like slow, gleaming peacocks. They are dressed differently, conceived differently, even move differently from the rest. The result is oddly cool and lonely. "
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"Hie thee to the Longacre Theatre, should you be interested in seeing one of the more dismal Shakespeare productions ever to grace—or rather besmirch—a Broadway stage in recent memory. The highly anticipated production of 'Macbeth,' starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, closes the pandemic-plagued Broadway season on a dispiritingly dreary note. Misguided in execution and largely indifferently acted, this minimalist production does no favors to either of its talented stars."
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"In one of Gold’s riskier directorial flourishes, the dead of 'Macbeth' never really leave. Even aside from the usual ghosts and apparitions, Gold’s stage will be populated by the sitting, silent victims of all that bloodletting, a choice that casts an appropriately spooky spell even as it – along with an unnecessary, weirdly upbeat visual coda – ultimately undercuts the wreckage and finality every bloody 'Macbeth' deserves."
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"It is in no way original to focus, as a curtain speech tells us here, on the witches and what we might call the generally creepy vibe of the play. Under all the fog (and there is a lot of it), there isn’t much substance in this production, which clearly prioritizes an aesthetic and a mood over acting, coherence and Shakespeare’s text."
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"We’re there to witness the latest attempt by the maddeningly inconsistent director Sam Gold to infuse new life into a classic play. Perhaps we should have taken a hint from the production’s marketing, which prominently features the names of the stars and director while Shakespeare’s is nowhere to be seen. In retrospect, that seems appropriate, since this is far more Sam Gold’s 'Macbeth' than the Bard’s."
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