‘Macbeth’ Broadway Review: Daniel Craig And Ruth Negga Take Stab At Killer Chemistry In Uneven Reign Of Shakespeare’s Ambitious Royals

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A very busy Broadway season comes to a close with its final production, and Sam Gold’s staging of Macbeth starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga is nothing if not a dynamic attempt to cap an unusual and often extraordinary theater season.

Uneven – if not so much as Gold’s 2019 King Lear with Glenda Jackson – and peppered with choices both curious (what, no “double double toil and trouble?”) and captivating (a brief prologue that’s as funny as it is timely), this iteration of The Scottish Play, which opened last night at the Longacre Theatre, nearly holds up to the unavoidable hype of its starry cast.Craig, 007-strong if forcefully one-note in the title role, and Negga – whose transformation from murderously ambitious soldier’s wife to haunted, spot-damning wreck is one of the production’s delights – lead a large cast that includes stand-outs Amber Gray (in the gender-switched role of the doomed Banquo), Paul Lazar (as the doomed King Duncan) and Grantham Coleman (as the doomed Macduff).With all that doom, and a creative team that’s anything but withholding, this Macbeth promises lots of stage blood, eerie lighting and fog machines (hand-held and cleverly employed), all enhanced by effectively creepy original music (by Gaelynn Lea) that underscores the witchery, throat-slitting and madness with ominous Psycho strings and thunder drums.

Gold makes good on all those promises, at least.Performed on a mostly unfurnished stage, with Christine Jones’ set designed as a brick-and-scaffold backstage area, this Macbeth is contemporary in both dress and approach.

Craig begins as the soldier Macbeth in a tight-fitting white t-shirt, black slacks and long, vaguely military-style gray coat, but adopts a more elitist (and not always