Denzel Washington as Brutus in Julius Caesar...

[Crankie Avalon]

This seems like such an interesting staging. Too bad if the production really is as flawed as this particular reviewer says...



Choppers Over Philippi
Faint praise for Caesar: It's better than a thousand recycled pop-catalog Broadway musicals

by Michael Feingold

Most of Shakespeare's plays require an audience to make one time-jump, back to the era of his language and his social conventions. His plays set in ancient Rome, like Julius Caesar, are trickier to stage because they require two such jumps: first to Shakespeare's England, then to that England's conception of the classical past. Julius Caesar is full of lines about what it is to be a Roman, and situations set up to display the Elizabethan idea of Roman standards of conduct. At the same time, its action and details are filled with Elizabethan daily life, coupled with Shakespeare's shrewd sense of what drives people to extreme political actions, and what tactics they choose to defend themselves when the actions veer off course.

Daniel Sullivan's production adds another layer by making Rome a timeless mix of past and present, set in a jumble of ancient walls and modern girders. The senators wear suits, the plebeians wear shapeless green uniforms, and gruff, feisty Caesar (William Sadler) sports a guerrillero's red beret. Swords and daggers still do most of the killing, but the knives that stab Caesar are smuggled into the Forum in an attaché case, while helicopters whir and mortar barrages explode over the plains of Philippi. This wouldn't be bad if it heightened the play's immediacy. For despite its stirring high-tension confrontation scenes and the string of familiar passages that have made it one of Shakespeare's most quoted plays, Julius Caesar is actually a very hard play to bring off. Somber, austere, and almost clinical in its emotional distance, it features a hero (Brutus) whose goodness is marred by a violent act for which we only get cursory, incomplete justifications, matched with an antagonist (Marc Antony) who seems most often to be a viciously calculating manipulator...

More: http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/0514,feingold1,62707,11.html

[rocktivity]

1. If MARLON BRANDO can play Brutus, ANYBODY can.

:eyes:
rocknation

On Edit: They're wearing SUITS AND TIES????

[Crankie Avalon]

2. Actually, if you're referring to the film version...

...Marlon Brando played Mark Antony. James Mason was Brutus. :)

[rocktivity]

3. I stand corrected

And he was terrible anyway.

:headbang:
rocknation