USA: "FRASIER" TELEVISION STAR KELSEY GRAMMER STARS IN NEW YORK PRODUCTION OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAY MACBETH

Record ID: 389758

  • Title: USA: "FRASIER" TELEVISION STAR KELSEY GRAMMER STARS IN NEW YORK PRODUCTION OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAY MACBETH
  • Date: 15th June 2000
  • Summary: (REUTERS) (PERFORMANCE CLEARANCE REQUIRED FOR RESALE) SLV SCENE FROM MACBETH
  • Embargoed: 30th June 2000 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: NEW YORK, NEW YORK, US
  • Country: USA
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVAXVEHGFDLVRO3PEPPFCAQFTHM
  • Story Text: Kelsey Grammer, best known as tv's Frasier, opened on Broadway Wednesday as Macbeth, the pernicious equivocator in this, Shakespeare's darkest play. Directed by Terry Hands, formerly of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the production features an all American cast. Set in a minimalist black void, the staging is stark and ominous.
    Seduced by the forces of evil in the form of The Three Witches and Lady Macbeth, the play traces the heroic army Captain's descent into madness and tyranny. As such the play studies Macbeth's moral agony through the dichotomies of good and evil, reality and illusion, reason and emotion.
    How fitting that Kelsey Grammer, star of the hit tv sitcome Frasier, should place the lead roll. Extracurricular activities in the late 80s and 90s could have provided plenty of experience as the actor fought drug and alcohol addictions, and two failed marriages before meeting his current wife, Camille Donatacci.
    In the play, after the murder of King Duncan, the play's turning point in Act II, Scene II, Macbeth, costumed entirely in black, emerges from a steep flight of stairs, his hands and the two daggers he still holds drenched in the red of blood.
    A color Lady Macbeth assumes when she takes the daggers from him.
    As portrayed by Kelsey Grammer, Macbeth is a man who tries to contain time. Upon news of his wife's suicide he proclaims, "She should have died hereafter; / There would have been a time for such a word. To-morrow". At which point the actor takes an unexpected lengthy pause. As the famous soliloquy continues "and to-morrow, and to-morrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time; ".
    Grammer, though most well known for his television comedy roles is a classically trained actor wh is n stranger to the Bard. A graduate of hte prestigious Juilliard School. He has acted in five different productions of A Midssumer Night's Dream and played Cassio to James Earl Jones' Othello on Broadway.
    In time, all good things come to pass. And, by the play's end, order is restored. With the slow light of dawn emerge the green woods from which Macbeth's assassins have arrived to restore virtue and justice.
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