E-Mail This Article to a Friend Witch craft Macbeth conquers on the Common BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Macbeth By William Shakespeare. Directed by Steven Maler. Set by Scott Bradley. Costumes by Clint E.B. Ramos. Lighting by Linda O’Brien. Sound and original music by J Hagenbuckle. Fight director Robert Walsh. With Georgia Hatzis, Mara Sidmore, Christina Bynoe, Baron Kelly, Dan Domingues, Bill Mootos, Jay O. Sanders, Benjamin Evett, Jennie Israel, Christopher Hagberg, Robert Walsh, and Julie Jirousek. Presented by Commonwealth Shakespeare Company at the Parkman Bandstand on Boston Common through August 10.

Don’t cry for her, Argentina — Eva Perón has moved up, from Andrew Lloyd Webber to Shakespeare. But before you moan, "Oh no, a concept production," rest assured that Commonwealth Shakespeare Company artistic director Steven Maler has more than marriage to Evita in mind for Macbeth, this eighth annual free gift of the Bard on Boston Common. The parallels between a tragedy conflated from 10th- and 11th-century events in Scotland and recent oppressive South and Central American regimes are not slammed — except in one scene, where the murderous Macbeths seem to step right off Evita’s balcony.

The real impetus for Maler’s brute, flamboyantly choreographed pageant of military statecraft and supernatural infestation would seem to be a small scene sometimes cut from the play, in which, following the title character’s initial blood sacrifice to "vaunting ambition," the noble Ross and a nameless old man take the stage. "By the clock ’tis day," says Ross, "And yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp." " ’Tis unnatural," the old man (here a priest) replies, going on to chronicle various savageries in the natural world that have accompanied Macbeth’s midnight murder of King Duncan.

Also critical to the production are traditions surrounding the Halloween-like Day of the Dead that’s celebrated South of the Border. Indeed, the Witches, first seen strewing the orange cempasuchil flowers with which spirits are lured on the holiday and replacing a trio of Madonnas on small wooden carts, are in charge for the evening. They waft in and out, painting the walls with blood and manipulating the action from start to finish — like less savory versions of Thornton Wilder’s Stage Manager. Even at the end, when "wholesome days" have been restored to the production’s decidedly Catholic Scotland, the Weird Sisters remain, like a bad smell.

There is little to wrinkle your nose at, though, in the production, one of CSC’s most potent and assured (and actually more rabble-rousing than its Henry V). Thanks to Maler, lighting designer Linda O’Brien, music man J Hagenbuckle, and fight director Robert Walsh, the show on Boston Common moves — if hardly quickly, at two hours, 40 minutes, for one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays — with bold dramatic sweep. There are times when, as Scotland bleeds, O’Brien’s lurid brush strokes of lighting make Scott Bradley’s skeletal cave of a set glow like a half-burned building. The Apparitions that the witches conjure to prognosticate for Macbeth are not hoky spirits but pulsing fans of light and smoke with which the usurping king, raised like a statue above the cauldron, wrestles. Hagenbuckle’s now infectious, now eerie score moves among military fanfare, churchly choral whisper, percussive rhythms, and Piazzolla in a kilt. At the end, when the future of a nation wrenched from rightful hands comes down to a face-off between the fragmenting tyrant and the man not "of woman born," the two stand out on a sepia-green battlefield, the only combatants in natural color.

Atmosphere and effect, of course, are but the icing on the cake. And the cake here is heavy at times, the declamatory performance full of sound and fury albeit signifying a good deal. But Boston Common is not the proper venue for subtlety, and what registers too big up close may in fact seem life-size farther back. I am thinking in particular of Robert Walsh’s intelligently conceived Macduff, whose journey from rigid militarism to unhinged grief is almost operatic but whose eloquent body language movingly speaks his anguish.

The burly and imposing Jay O. Sanders, well-spoken but given to rant, is very much a soldier Macbeth, more at ease with his sleeves rolled up or staggering under the burden of battle fatigue than dressed in military pomp. He’s silky enough when handling potential assassins, though, and initially incredulous at his own new-hatched villainy. By the time it comes to "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow," he seems as likely to drown in corrosive irony as crackpot "valiant fury."

There are solid performances by Benjamin Evett as a companionable if suspicious Banquo, Bill Mootos as a kindly Ross, and Dan Domingues as a callow yet unspoiled Malcolm. Jennie Israel is the Eva-Perón-meets-Rita-Hayworth Lady Macbeth, all goading and then damage-controlling pulchritude. Her reading is clear and hearty, even in the sleepwalking scene where she utters a keening "sigh" as full-bodied as port. But no Fiona Shaw, she’s neither a Lady Macbeth to stand your hair on end nor one to break your heart. As for the mantilla-draped witches of Georgia Hatzis, Mara Sidmore, and Christina Bynoe, they do more to rot Macbeth’s nobility with voodoo than Israel’s partner-in-crime, up to her neck in 1940s smolder, does with sex.