Another strong, well-attended season in Griffith Park for the small company that started it’s life in LA ten years ago as a rental at the Odyssey. ‘Macbeth’ is especially good – honed to a fine edge over several months at ISC’s Atwater Village studio and steeped in blood by evening’s end. The young actors get better and more resonant every year and the strong core company ricochets unamplified off the walls of the Old Zoo overcoming picnics, coyotes, and just about any other distraction.
Anything except three addled hikers who got lost and infected with poison-oak in an urban recreation area, requiring three helicopters to appear just as Luis Galindo’s Macbeth burst out for the climactic scene. Blade noise and spotlights of one kind held up blade noise and spotlights of another kind for forty minutes to conduct an airlift. Of people lost a knife flick away from a thousand theatregoers. The show did go on and finish well despite the circumstances – the sound and fury speech concluding just as the last copter disappeared.
One more chopper and it could have been Stockhausen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13D1YY_BvWU
Macbeth and As You Like It run in repertory through 1 September. Details and schedules at http://www.iscla.org