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Out Damn Scot

According to some scholars, the origin of the curse of the Scottish play had nothing to do with actors falling off the stage or dropping dead in the dressing room. It was about jobs. Given that Macbeth was seen as a surefire cash cow, the announcement that a troupe would be performing it meant only one thing: The company manager was going to close up shop and vanish into the night with the box-office revenue. Whether or not the story is true, Shakespeare's most visceral play is a theme-park ride of thrills and blood-spilling.

But Macbeth isn't some sort of Elizabethan action flick. As in so many of his works, Shakespeare is interested in the battle between passion and reason. But unlike his later plays, in Macbeth there's never any doubt that passion will triumph, which is exactly what makes the play so powerful. Macbeth's fate is tragic because he knows his actions will lead him straight to hell--but he makes the journey anyway.

Unfortunately, much of this goes unrecognized in the Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival's shallow production. With poor performances from both Jack Koenig (Macbeth) and E. Ashley Izard (Lady Macbeth) we're forced to rely on Jerold R. Forsyth's angular lighting and Fabian Obispo's jump-out-of-your-skin sound design to provide the production's intensity. A lesson in bad acting 101, Koenig's ostentatious portrayal is nothing more than "sound and fury, signifying nothing." Izard fares slightly better, but even though director Gus Kaikkonen has updated the story to the 1920s, Izard's ladylike portrayal lacks the necessary ferocity to make her seem truly dangerous.

When the Macbeths disappear, though, the production is often quite effective. Representing the play's many locations with only the fewest of props, Kaikkonen's spirited staging keeps the action speeding forward (his only error being the overuse of the stage's grate-covered trap door). The supporting cast proves more than capable, especially Jared Michael Delaney as Malcolm and newcomer Trice Baldwin, who is magnificent in a brief appearance as the ill-fated Lady MacDuff.

>> Through May 18. $26-$28. Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival, 2111 Sansom St. 215.496.8001. www.phillyshakespeare.org

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The Joyce of Music

Lucia Anna Joyce may seem slightly catatonic, but that never stopped Britney Spears. Cassandra Friend, who's beguiling in a Thorazine haze, plays the poet, dancer, schizophrenic and rock 'n' roller who's the focus of James Joyce Is Dead and So Is Paris: The Lucia Joyce Cabaret, the latest production from the Pig Iron Theatre Company. Set in Northampton mental hospital (a carnivallike dungeon of barker booths, mattresses, meshed wire and a weeping Eiffel Tower), JJIDASIP is a rock cabaret/theater spectacle focusing on Lucia's memories of her father and her early days on the streets of Paris with her lover, Samuel Beckett.

Featuring a dense and diverse rock score from composer James Sugg, director Dan Rothenberg's production is stark, extravagant and deceptively sloppy. As the institute's "droolers, spitters and criminals" wander through the audience bopping to the music, Lucia and a host of guest vocalists (a group of patients who also serve as musicians) rip through songs with titles like "Virgin Under the Bridge" and "Nothing in Your Head." Sugg's music isn't linked to Deborah Stein's text in a traditional fashion, but it is adept at providing a general atmosphere of disturbance and outrage.

The well-drilled ensemble is marvelous, though several roles could be more developed, especially that of Harvey (Dito van Reigersberg), the quietly anxious mental patient whose considerable vocal talents are utilized only on "Napoleon's Song," a lovely tune and the show's best number.

Emmanuelle Delpech, in a more fully realized supporting role, is sensational as the institutionalized Madeline, who offers amusing portrayals of both Charlie Chaplin and Nora Joyce. Spontaneous, vital and alive, JJIDASIP--like so many Pig Iron efforts--is not entirely accomplished. (For instance, the link between Lucia Joyce and Lucia di Lammermoor, the mentally anguished heroine of Gaetano Donizetti's opera, is obscure.) But the dramaturgical ambiguities are more than compensated by the show's considerable daring and originality.

JJIDASIP may not be Pig Iron's finest work, but the group's first original-score musical reasserts their status as Philadelphia's most imaginative theater company.

>> Through April 26. $20. Christ Church Annex, Second and Church sts. 215.627.1883. www.pigiron.org

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