For me, the looks of this production diminish its rhetorical and dramatic excellence. Director James MacDonald crafts a reasonably conventional and straightforward version of the popular history play, making gestures with modern-looking designs and props and suggestive video effects toward emphasizing contemporary political relevance. Nothing new there: my first recollection of Julius Caesar is a revival I saw of Margaret Webster's interpretation which incorporated World War II uniforms and Nazi symbols. Placing his "mob" actors in the audience to shout at the orators onstage is also a familiar device, and it works excitingly.
But too many costumes and props and visual effects seem to contradict one another or just look foolish. The scenery is a little too unspecified generic. And I pity the unfortunate actor who has to deliver menacing lines about his sword while he produces what looks like a little steak knife from his coat pocket. If televised, those fight scenes would be splendid lead-ins for a "male enhancement" advertisement.
Dennis Boechler's costumes initially struck me as a clever accommodation of modern dress to a suggestion of Ancient Rome: in the Senate, the men wear long ivory-colored coats with wine-colored sashes draped across their chests diagonally or horizontally and then draped down the side in a suggestion of togas and uniform formality. Brutus wears a gold modern suit with a wine-colored cravat at the neck under the jacket and wine diagonal sash across it. But he has what looks like a big apron under the jacket, and the soldiers later have modern uniforms with matching skirt-like aprons over their trousers. Mark Anthony once appears to kneel on his apron.
The general look of their clothes is clumsy and peculiar. Brutus also runs onto a steak knife to kill himself, calling it his sword. The brilliant lights onstage accompanied by mechanical modern amplified sounds would have scared those legions back to Africa, but they don't really connect to this play.
Geraint Wyn Davies is a handsome, distinguished looking Caesar, even when he has to be whited out to keep reappearing to Brutus as a ghost. Tom Rooney's sour Cassius seems more fussy than passionate, with a mean and cantankerous look more than a "lean and hungry" one, but he interacts dynamically with Ben Carlson's Brutus in their combative scene in Brutus's tent. The play is really more about Brutus than Caesar or Mark Antony, and Ben Carlson, whose thrilling Hamlet highlighted last season, is genuinely moving, trapped in conflicting friendships and beliefs and trying so decently to resolve them that we are forced to accept Antony's eulogy, "This was the noblest Roman of them all ." Jonathan Goad brings a nobility to Mark Antony that lets us overlook what could easily be the most calculating character in the play. Antony's great speech manipulates the mob like trained dogs, and Goad plays it initially with deliberate awkwardness, then builds it to a climax as Orson Welles and Marlon Brando imitating Welles both famously did. But Goad nervily takes it over the top so that his Antony seems to startle himself by virtually screaming out of control the "Cry Havoc!" line and holding it.
The men mostly deliver those famed, familiar speeches admirably here. Skye Brandon romps through Cinna the Poet's nice bit of frenzy when the mob kills that innocent man simply because he has the same name as a conspirator; the crowd movement is effective there too. Unfortunately, neither Yanna McIntosh nor Cara Ricketts gives Caesar's or Brutus's wife sufficient stature. And Dion Johnstone's Octavius Caesar and Ian Deakin's Lepidus also seem to be extras.
So, if you haven't seen a Julius Caesar for awhile and want to hear the great speeches and see the famous fights and crowd scenes handled by a top-notch theater group, this is a certified Choice endeavor. But I found it less memorable than Prime.
