Seeing "Macbeth" Again, Again, And Again

Macbeth is a great gateway drug for Shakespeare newbies. It’s got a straight-ahead plot, some of the Bard’s most memorable lines, plus witches. Us Shakespeare oldies like it too. It’s one of my favorites and despite the well-known superstition against saying its name in a theater (you’re supposed to say “The Scottish Play”) a lot of theater folks apparently also love it. Cause I’ve seen three variations in just the last six months.

First came Red Bull Theater’s production of Erica Schmidt’s Mac Beth, a reimagining of the play as a high-school revenge drama in which a band of contemporary girls meet after classes are over to rehearse the play and settle scores with one another in truly bloody fashion. 

I found the show to be a bit histrionic (click here to read my full review) but earlier this week came word that, starting Jan. 6, it will get a seven-week encore run at the Frederick Loewe Theatre at Hunter College.  

Last month the Roundabout Theatre Company opened Scotland, PA, a musical version of an indie film that sets the Bard’s tragedy in a small Pennsylvania town where stoners step in for the witches, the thane and his lady are recast as a meek fast-food restaurant worker and his more ambitious wife and the score is filled with composer Adam Gwon's ‘70s-style power ballads (click here for more about him). 

That show, which is running at the Laura Pels Theatre thru Dec. 8, amused lots of the critics, including The New York Times’ Jesse Green who found it “quietly insightful, making piquant connections between Shakespeare’s drama of political power lust and the consumerist mania of our own fast-food culture.”

Maybe. But I found Scotland, PA to be just silly. Or perhaps not silly enough since the cast members, while talented and perfectly pleasant, lack the go-for-broke zaniness that you need to pull off a spoof like this. 

The one exception is Jay Armstrong Johnson who brings a daffy charm to Banko, the lovable loser the show’s Mac eventually betrays. In the process, Johnson’s Banko also gives the show a heart it's otherwise missing.

The final entry in the Big Mac sweepstakes, at least for now, comes from Classic Stage Company. As usual, the company’s artistic director John Doyle applies his minimalist aesthetic to the production. 

That means there is practically no set. The costumes are drab shades of black, brown and gray. And the entire cast consists of nine actors, including the two who play Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, which leads to all kinds of confusion about who is killing whom.

But the biggest crime is that Doyle doesn’t seem to have any reason for doing the play. The message of Mac Beth is that teenage girls can be as vicious as medieval warriors. Scotland, PA wants to show that even when the stakes are low, good people can turn into venal ones in pursuit of them.

Doyle’s take, however, isn’t sturdy enough to make the case for doing Shakespeare traditionally or offbeat enough to provide new insights into the play or telling parallels between its time and ours. 

Instead, he does some gender-bending casting with Mary Beth Peil as King Duncan, although that’s less daring after the female Lears and Henry Vs we’ve recently seen. 

He also attempts to go post-modern by changing the famous opening scene in which the witches ask “When shall we three meet again,”  so that the entire cast intones the lines. But of course that makes no sense at all: is everybody, including the Macbeths, supposed to be witches who are in on the evil game?

Perhaps Doyle did the play to showcase Corey Stoll, who, although still best known for his TV roles has been building up his Shakespeare street cred over the past few years in productions for Shakespeare in the Park.  And under surer direction, Stoll might have made a commanding Macbeth. But here, left directorially adrift, he flounders, resorting to shouting and arm flailing. 

And it’s even more obvious that Nadia Bowers, Stoll’s real-life wife (click here to read more about the couple), could have used help in shaping her wan Lady Macbeth.

Still the play has fared worst (click here to read my review of the Lincoln Center debacle of a few years ago) and odds are that Macbeth will soon be given the chance to show its might in some other production soon. 

This "Macbeth" is Brawny But It Lacks Magic

You might think that I’d be ready to give Shakespeare a rest after the recent Bard-heavy season on Broadway. But I bought tickets to Kenneth Branagh’s acclaimed production of Macbeth the very morning they went on sale. For this production marks Branagh’s New York stage debut and his first stage production of Shakespeare in nearly a decade.

Branagh made his theatrical bones in 1984 when he was just 24 with the landmark Royal Shakespeare Company production of Henry V that he also turned into a terrific movie. Later, as the actor-manager of the Renaissance Theatre Company, he took on the iconic roles of Romeo, Hamlet, Coriolanus and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, causing some observers to declare him the thespian heir to Laurence Olivier. 

 

But the company disbanded in 1992 and Branagh drifted into other ventures, including playing the title character in the film noir TV crime series “Wallander,” directing the superhero film “Thor” and making a cameo appearance in one of the “Harry Potter” movies. 

Then, a couple of years ago, he got a joint commission from the Manchester International Festival and the Park Avenue Armory to do a production of Macbeth, with himself in the title role. 

Branagh recruited Rob Ashford to be his co-director and persuaded the dynamic British actress Alex Kingston to play his Lady Macbeth. The production had a triumphant world premiere at the festival last summer and is now playing at the Armory through June 22.

Although the stage area fills up only a small portion of the Armory’s mammoth drill hall, the entire place has been enlisted for this production. Theatergoers are divided into “clans” named after the warring factions in the play and sent to wait in one of the Armory’s beautiful regiment rooms. Each group gets it own program with a clan-specific tartan cover—my theatergoing buddy Bill and I were in the Angus clan.  

A gong sounds 20 minute before show time and each clan is then escorted into the main hall, which has been transformed into the spooky desolate bog of medieval Scotland. The audience is seated on padded bleachers on both sides of a long dirt-filled trench that is buttressed on one end by a Stonehenge-like pagan structure and on the other by a religious alter underneath a huge Christian cross (click here to read more about the making of the set).

 

It took about 40 minutes for everyone to get ushered in and seated but once the play gets going, the action whooshes by in a fast-paced two hours with no intermission. This is a high-testosterone production with lots of tall, brawny soldiers (there are over two dozen people in the cast), big muscular sword fights, rainstorms that turn the dirt to mud and lusty encounters between the Macbeths. 

And there are lots of spook-house thrills. Murders that usually occur offstage are gruesomely re-enacted right in front of the audience. The witches who foretell Macbeth's fate, blonde-haired vampire sylphs, seem to hover in the air.

It’s all dazzling and spine-tingly thrilling to watch but less so to hear. The acoustics are difficult in a hall of that size and the accents made it even more of a challenge to understand all of what the actors are saying. People with shaky memories of the play might also have a difficult time sorting out the characters and their alliances.

 

The quieter moments play best. Scarlett Strallen is a poignant Lady Macduff and Richard Coyle commands attention as the grieving husband who avenges her cruel death. I actually found myself sorry that the evening hadn’t just focused on their story.

Now, that's not to say that Branagh and Kingston, best known in this country for her work on the old TV medical drama “ER,” were bad. He is appropriately courageous and conflicted as any Macbeth should be, although he speaks more quickly than most. She is strong-willed, sexy and, like a good Lady Macbeth, convincingly devoted to her husband’s wicked ambitions (click here to read an interview with her).

 

But, despite the production’s stated intention to focus on the love between the deadly couple (click here to read more about that) neither brings new colors to the roles in the way that Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood did in the 2007 production that imagined Macbeth as an older husband trying to prove his virility to a childless—and ruthless—younger trophy wife (click here to see clips of that production and some other legendary ones).

There is, as Bill said on our walk to dinner after the show, no clearly delineated yin-yang dynamic. Which means there's no clear explanation for why the Macbeths do what they do. In the end, the clashing sounds and passionate fury of this Macbeth may be impressive but I wanted it all to signify something more.

How "Macbeth" Vanquishes Ethan Hawke

You’ve got to love Ethan Hawke.  Or at least I do.  I can’t think of another actor working today who displays such obvious love for the theater—from his choice of challenging roles in plays ranging from Chekhov to Stoppard to the comradely slaps on the back he gives his fellow actors at curtain calls to his enthusiastic participation in cast parties (my husband K and I spotted him at one at the West Bank Cafe and he wasn’t making one of those obligatory drive-by appearances; in fact, he was just about the last person to leave).

As I said, you gotta love the guy. So it pains me to say this but it’s hard to love Hawke’s interpretation of Macbeth in Lincoln Center Theater’s new production of Shakespeare’s tragedy about the overly ambitious nobleman who murders his way to the Scottish throne.  

There has been a rash of Macbeths over the last few years—Patrick Stewart, Alan Cumming and Kenneth Branagh in an acclaimed production due here this summer—and each actor has burrowed into the character’s troubled soul. Hawke, however, isn’t able to breach the surface.  

In fact, the whole production, directed by the usually reliable Jack O’Brien is, as a famous line from the play says, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Just as David Leveaux did with his production of Romeo and Juliet (which is closing this weekend, a month ahead of schedule) O’Brien has filled the stage with dazzling things to look at.

Seemingly real flowers wither and decay in the blink of an eye. Blazing torches, lasers and other fancy lighting by Japhy Weideman create an appropriately eerie mood. 

And the stunning gowns Catherine Zuber has designed for Lady Macbeth are to die for (although her costumes for the men are all over the place—“Game of Thrones” leather for daywear and “Downton Abbey-style” frock coats for evening).

Where the production really falls down is in its performances. Nearly everyone on stage, most egregiously Hawke, races through his or her speeches as though afraid of forgetting the lines. 

Moreover, their voices not only lack projection but, with a few exceptions (Richard Easton’s dignified Duncan, Daniel Sunjata’s macho Macduff [click here for a Q&A with him] and, most especially Bianca Amato as an affecting Lady Macduff) they’re missing resonance and emotion as well.

It may be unfair to make comparisons to the Twelfth Night and Richard III that Mark Rylance has brought to Broadway from London’s Globe theater, but speech after speech in this Macbeth made me wonder if that old canard about American’s being unable to do Shakespeare as well as the Brits might be true. 

Except that Lady Macbeth is played by the celebrated British actress Anne-Marie Duff, who, in her American debut, fares little better. Her sleepwalking scene left most of the audience yawning.

As always, the crowd pleasers are the three witches who predict Macbeth’s fate. O’Brien has cast men—Malcolm Gets, John Glover and Byron Jennings—in the roles and they, particularly Glover, camp it up. 
   
But, as my sister Joanne said, at least they’re lively (click here to read about them).  Apparently deciding to make full use of the best card he's been dealt, O'Brien has added them to almost every scene. So, after a while, even they wear out their welcome.

Still, there is one area in which Hawke acquits himself well.  Popular with young women, who love his romantic movies “Before Sunrise” and "Before Sunset;” and with guys, who like his turns in horror films like “Sinister” and “The Purge,” he is drawing a young and racially diverse audience to the Vivian Beaumont theater where the production is scheduled to run until Jan. 12. The college-age girls sitting next to me swooned every time Hawke came onstage.

Theater lovers who are fussier about their Shakespeare would probably do better to head to the Belasco Theater, where the Rylance productions are playing in rep.  Or to wait for some other chance—and I'm sure it will come—to love Hawke again.

Who's Won the Chance to Hail Macbeth?

It’s a little surprising to me but you guys seem to prefer free cast recordings and tell-all books to free theater seats. Still, a couple of you did write in for the giveaway of two free tickets to see Lincoln Center Theater’s new production of Macbeth, directed by the ever-inventive Jack O’Brien and starring the always-passionate Ethan Hawke.

Once again, everyone who responded to my giveaway question about who last played Macbeth on Broadway got it right and once again the right answer was Alan Cumming. So after the usual ritual (I put names in hat, my husband  K plucks one out) the winner is Ron Kaehler.

Kudos to him and to the rest of you who participated in this giveaway go-around. And here are a couple of consolation prizes for everyone:

The first is a brief sneak peek at the meet-and-greet between the press and the cast (which in addition to Hawke, includes Richard Easton as the doomed King Duncan; Brian D’Arcy James and Daniel Sunjata as Macbeth’s comrades-in-arms-turned-rivals Banquo and Macduff; Malcolm Gets, John Glover and Byron Jennings as the witches; young Jonny Orsini as the eventual victor Malcolm and Anne-Marie Duff as Lady Macbeth). You can view it by clicking here.

The second is a 30-minute interview with Hawke about his career and how he got into acting, which you can see here.

And if all of this makes you eager to see the production, which just opened on Thursday and is scheduled to run through Jan. 12, you can get a discount off the ticket price if you use the code:  MACBLOG89.

Move Over Hamlet, "Macbeth" Is Increasingly the Main Man for Some Major Stars

People— actors and theatergoers alike—can’t seem to get enough of Macbeth. The talented young Scottish actor James McAvoy took it on earlier this year in London A new production starring Kenneth Branagh is scheduled to run for the first three weeks in July at the Manchester International Festival—tickets sold out in half an hour, although the final performance on July 20 will be simulcast by NT Live (click here to read my Tidbit about the NT simulcast I saw of Helen Mirren's The Audience).  

On this side of the Atlantic, Lincoln Center Theater has just announced that Ethan Hawke is going to star in a production that will open on Nov. 21. Meanwhile, Sleep No More, the Punchdrunk Company’s immersive take on the play, will begin its third year next week and the versatile actor Alan Cumming is currently playing in an essentially one-man production at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre through the end of this month (click here to see clips from some other legendary productions). 

Personally, I don’t mind the glut.  Macbeth was one of the first Shakespeare plays I ever saw back when I was in grade school (the play is a great choice for kids because it’s Shakespeare’s shortest and its witches are a familiar carryover from childhood fairy tales.) 

The Bard's tale of the Scottish thane who murders his way to the throne remains one of my favorites. Neither my husband K nor I can bring ourselves to erase the PBS telecast of Patrick Stewart’s 2008 production (click here to read what I thought about it when I saw the show at BAM before its move to Broadway). 

I wasn’t that crazy about Sleep No More (click here to read my review of it). But I was totally intrigued by the idea of the Cumming production in which he plays all the characters. So I was bummed when I missed its brief run during last summer’s Lincoln Center Festival and grateful to have the chance to see the show when it moved to Broadway this spring.

This version has been set in what appears to be the criminal ward of a psychiatric hospital and the play opens as a doctor and an orderly check in a patient who is clearly in shock and streaked with blood. They remove his clothes and help him into a hospital gown, scrape blood samples from underneath his fingernails and put him to bed.  

“When shall we three meet again?” the patient asks, invoking the play’s opening lines, as the attendants leave and lock him in the room. And then, over the course of the next 100 intermissionless minutes, Cumming, who grew up in a small Scottish market town and trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, acts out the rest of what actors call the Scottish play.

It’s a tour de force performance. To distinguish one character from another, Cumming changes the intonation of his voice and employs simple props like holding a towel demurely across his chest when he’s Lady Macbeth or bouncing an apple when he’s the ill-fated Banquo.  

There are several nude scenes and Cumming's emotions are on wholly naked display throughout the performance.  I found myself marveling at how he could put himself through the experience of it eight times a week.

And yet, the show isn’t a total success.  Directors John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg create lots of business (video projections, an eerie soundscape) to hold the audiences’ attention.  But It can be difficult to follow who’s saying what, even when you know the play as well as I do.  

It is a treat to hear Cumming speak in his own accent instead of the American twang he adapts for roles like the political fixer Eli Gold on TV’s “The Good Wife,” but it can, at times, be difficult to understand his burr.

Plus, the mystery is never revealed of who the patient is, what he did or why he’s obsessed with Macbeth.  And since I’m kind of obsessed with Macbeth myself, I ended up wanting a little less of Cumming and a little more of the actual play.

Fishburne Brings the Goods to "Thurgood"

Making fun of movie stars who sign up for Broadway shows is something of a blood sport for the theaterati. But over the past few weeks, I think I’ve begun to understand those film actors a little better. If they’re truly talented and if they really care about their craft, how much satisfaction can they get from just cavorting in front of a blue screen, issuing imperious commands, saving the world over and over again as the big blockbuster movies that now dominate Hollywood demand they do?

So it makes sense to me that Professor Xavier of the “X-Men” series and Morpheus of “The Matrix” movies are currently appearing on Broadway. And Patrick Stewart (Xavier) and Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus) are not only nourishing their own creative souls but also treating audiences to superb performances in, respectively, Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Thurgood, the one-man show about the civil rights attorney and the nation’s first black Supreme Court Justice that opened Wednesday night at the Booth Theatre.

Both actors are truly talented and masters of their craft who not only have appeared on Broadway in the past but have been nominated for Tonys. And I’m betting that they’ll be nominated this year too. Fishburne actually won a Tony with his Broadway debut in 1992 as an ex-con in August Wilson’s Two Trains Running. And seven years later, he made a splendid and regal Henry II opposite Stockard Channing’s Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter. Although I confess what I most remember about the latter performance was Fisburne’s stepping out of character to dress down an audience member whose ringing cell phone interrupted an intense scene between the royal pair. Channing seemed taken aback but the audience burst into supportive applause.

Fishburne stays brilliantly in character during Thurgood. The play was written by George Stevens, Jr., the film and TV producer whose credits include the annual “The Kennedy Center Honors” broadcast and the popular “The American Film Institute Life Achievement Awards.” But back in 1991, Stevens also produced, directed and wrote the TV movie “Separate But Equal” about the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that legally ended segregation in the U.S. Sidney Poitier played Marshall, who, as the lead attorney for the NAACP, argued the case before the Court. Stevens has said that his continuing interest in Marshall lead him to write a play, his first, about him.

The resulting 90-minute piece is presented as a lecture that the elderly Justice gives about his life at his alma mater Howard University. Thurgood trades on Marshall’s reputation as a raconteur and it’s nicely salted with humorous tales. But it still comes off as one of those Ken Burns-style documentaries you might see on PBS or the History Channel, complete with video projections of relevant scenes—a sharecroppers’ shack when he talks about his travels through the segregated south; pretty brown-skinned flappers when he describes meeting his first wife; the steps of the Supreme Court when he recalls his first visit there.

You need a great actor to bring a work like this to anything approaching dramatic life. James Earl Jones leant his commanding presence to the role when the play was originally produced at the Westport Country Playhouse in 2006 but, apparently, opted to do the all-black revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof instead of bringing Thurgood to Broadway. Luckily, the producers persuaded Fishburne to step in. Fishburne, who is only 47, wasn’t even born when the Court handed down the unanimous Brown decision and he has admitted in several interviews (click here to read one he gave New York magazine) that he knew very little about Marshall before accepting the role. But he looks eerily like the Justice and he uses both his acting chops and movie-star charisma to draw the audience into Marshall’s story.

I’ve just finished reading Jeffrey Toobin’s terrific new book “The Nine,” which focuses on recent Supreme Court justices but includes a sizable cameo on Marshall, and so his story wasn’t new to me but I still had a good time. Like Golda’s Balcony, the one-woman show about the former Israeli Prime Minister that opened in 2003, Thurgood clearly intends to educate as much as entertain. And it does a fairly good job of both. “You learn so much,” I overheard a woman saying as we all made our way out of the theater. But unlike Golda’s Balcony, which starred the stage stalwart Tovah Feldshuh and played 493 performances, Thurgood is scheduled for a limited run that is now set to end on June 22. After that, Fishburne, alas for theater lovers, is heading back to making movies.

Tedious "Conversations in Tusculum"

Expectations can sometimes play as big a role in how you feel about a show as what you actually see. I had big expectations for Conversations in Tusculum, the new play that opened at The Public Theater last week. It’s written by Richard Nelson, one of this country’s smartest and most versatile playwrights—his works include adaptations like James Joyce’s The Dead, books for musicals like Chess, and original plays like Franny’s Way and Two Shakespearean Actors. The show’s premise—a kind of prequel to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that focuses on the plotters who would assassinate him—sounded as though it could be the sort of fun that Tom Stoppard once had with Hamlet’s school pals Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. And its cast—Brian Dennehy, Aidan Quinn, Joe Grifasi, Gloria Reuben, David Strathairn, and Maria Tucci—is a Mount Olympus of stage acting talent.

But my oh-no antenna began to buzz the minute the show started and Quinn and Strathairn, playing Brutus and Cassius, came on stage wearing outfits that looked less like those of Roman noblemen than hand-me-downs from the Russian gentry in The Coast of Utopia. (I don’t know what it is that costume designers suddenly seem to have against period dress—the Medieval thanes in the production of Macbeth that recently played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and is now transferring to Broadway wear Stalin-era military uniforms; and the lord and ladies in the Mark Morris production of King Arthur that closed at New York City Opera over the weekend wore 21st century yoga outfits.) Still, I’m enough of a theatergoing veteran to know that sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith and follow the director’s vision.

In this case, though, the director was Nelson himself. And as both writer and director, he seem to have taken the show’s title seriously. Conversations in Tusculum is literally a series of conversations. All of the action—encounters with Caesar, battles, suicides, love affairs—take place off stage. And then the characters just sit around and talk about what happened. The play is clearly intended as an analogue to the current political situation (if you miss that, the Public’s artistic director Oskar Eustis helpfully points it out in his program notes) but I felt as though I were stuck at a party where all everyone did was sit around whining about their boss.

Jane Smiley did something similarly last year in her novel “Ten Days in the Hills,” an updating of Boccaccio's “Decameron” in which a group of family and friends literally head for the hills to avoid a catastrophe—a plague in Boccaccio; the start of the Iraq war in Smiley—that threatens their way of life. But Smiley spiced up her conversations with liberal dollops of sex talk and showbiz gossip from the Hollywood insiders she has standing in for Boccaccio’s Roman aristocracy, and with a sense of humor—all without compromising her trenchant observations about art, politics and relationships. Nelson’s characters include an actor, amiably played by Grifasi, but there’s no levity to leaven the endless colloquies. Watching the play, my mind occasionally drifted off to the book and how much better a time I’d had with it. And sometimes, it just drifted.

I did the whining in the cab ride home with my theatergoing buddy Bill. He agreed that it wasn’t the most exciting show he’d seen. But he said he liked it better than I had. Unlike me, he had read the reviews that described the show as talky and had gone in with different expectations.

Hailing "Macbeth"

Part of the fun of seeing Shakespeare is seeing what the director, designers and actors do with the play they’ve chosen. No other playwright in history has had more stuff done to interpret and reinterpret his work. Rupert Goold, one of a seemingly endless string of smart young British directors, does lots of stuff with his production of Macbeth that hit it big in London last season and opened last week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. For starters, he has cast Patrick Stewart, the classically trained stage actor who made his name in the TV series, “Star Trek: The Next Generation;” and the “X-Men” movies, as the ambitious Scottish lord; and the actress Kate Fleetwood as a much younger Lady Macbeth, who is as high strung and lethal as a razor blade. That sets up a dynamic that makes great sense and gives the proceedings an extra edge—who needs Viagra when you’ve got the aphrodisiac of larcenous ambition shared by a successful older man and a trophy wife half his age.

But Goold doesn’t stop there. He sets the action in a Stalinist-like country and his basic set is a harsh industrial space that most closely resembles the morgue of a poorly funded hospital. He portrays the three witches as nurses there and then turns them into omnipresent muses of evil that neither Macbeth nor the audience can escape. Goold also uses the video projections that contemporary British directors seem to love. (I first saw them put to eye-catching effect two years ago in The Woman in White but now see them everywhere British imports are playing from Jerry Springer: The Opera to the current revival of Sunday in the Park with George.) The energetic director enlists horror movie techniques; there’s lots of blood and gore and shocks that actually made me jump. And he wades right into the play’s psychological murk; this is the most Freudian Macbeth I’ve ever seen.

And I’ve seen my fair share of Macbeths over the years. It may be my favorite of Shakespeare’s plays. That’s not necessarily because it’s one of his best but because it was one of my first. I can’t remember now if Macbeth or Twelfth Night was the actual first Shakespeare I ever saw but I saw them both when I was in grade school, thanks to the legendary Joe Papp’s free productions of the Bard that played in New York City parks during the summer and for New York City school kids during the rest of the year. I don’t know who was in the productions I saw but I do remember the thrill of seeing those two plays and I can still quote many of their lines. I imagine the relationship I have to these works is similar to the one the groundlings who first saw Shakespeare’s plays had with them. I think the groundlings would have liked Goold’s visceral production too.

And now word has come that Macbeth will march across the river and into the Lyceum Theatre (about to be vacated by Mark Twain's Is He Dead?) for an eight week run, beginning at the end of March. Just hearing Stewart, who has dreamed of playing the role since he was a boy, wrap his dulcet voice around Macbeth's speeches is probably worth the price of the ticket. And then, there's all the other stuff. One bit of warning, though, it all adds up to a production that runs about three hours.