June 15 Macbeth

Abstract Word from Boston spread around town on the afternoon of May 31 that Kelsey Grammer’s Macbeth-the first new Broadway show of the season-was about to disband its band of witches and shutter four days later, on Tony Award Sunday. This in the face of the worst pre-Broadway reviews in-well, nine weeks, when Elaine May’s Taller Than a Dwarf met similar resistance from the same critics at the same theatre in the same town. Terry Byrne of the Boston Herald noted that the play-which “usually incites gut-wrenching terror, sadness and, finally, redemption”-in Grammer’s hands “elicits only snickers and the kind of horror that comes from seeing a production go completely awry:’ Ed Siegel in the Boston Globe called it a “two-hour freight train of an adaptation:’ Markland Taylor of Variety called it “a reasonably competent, underlit staged reading:’ finding the star “a stolid, somewhat flat-footed middle-class, middle-aged man:’ Here, you had a surefire crowd nonpleaser. But you also had a major television star in tow.