Summary 
Modernized tragedy bolstered by not one or two but four compelling performances - Brutus, Cassius, Antony, Caesar - plus an interesting portrait of would-be First Lady Calphurnia - that nonetheless suffers from awkward costuming in contemporary suits and military uniforms over flowing togas. The second-half falters with focus on battlefields and combat - and a series of overwrought ant-war images - that diminishes the well-wrought politics and inner conflicts of the first half and overshadows the story as well as the uniformly fine acting.
Design
Directed by James MacDonald. Designed by David Boechler. Lights by Christopher Dennis. Sound by Peter McBoyle. Video by Sean Nieuwenhuis.
Cast
Ben Carlson (Brutus), Tom Rooney (Cassius), Jonathan Goad (Mark Antony), Geraint Wyn Davies (Julius Caesar), Gareth Potter (Decius Brutus), Timothy D. Stickney (Cinna), Yanna McIntosh (Calphurnia), Cara Ricketts (Portia), Dion Johnstone (Octavius Ceasar).
Analysis
James Macdonald's modern Julius Caesar gets off to strong start at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. With an ominous hum in the background, the image of a marble sculpture of Julius Caesar is projected on a downstage scrim. The image dissolves to the visage of actor Geraint Wyn Davies as the production opens, and the curtain lifts to reveal a stage of white-streaked brown marble, with unfurled banners upstage bearing Davies' profile proclaiming "Caesar." Davies' Caesar commands the stage - the capitol steps between Romanesque columns - with the suave smoothness of a self-satisfied and teflon-coated politician. He makes stylized and choreographed gestures - punctuated with piano chords - to a large milling crowd of commonly dressed citizens, their backs to the audience downstage. The scene segues into a state dinner, with Davies' suave Caesar working the crowd with his Jackie Kennedy or Michelle Obama-like Calphurnia at his side: she seems like a smiling First Lady in an array of colorful ensembles - a yellow dress with yellow pumps in public, a shimmering gold gown at the banquet - at ease with her husband's colleagues. Caesar embraces his favorite, Mark Antony - a youngish near-hippie in long dark hair with a burned-out swagger - and Davies' portrayal carries the first act.
MacDonald's mostly faceless commoner crowd is a ragtag band of Roman citizens wearing jeans and shorts and mini-dresses with an odd combination of untucked dress shirts, togas and T-shirts in a partially modernized vision of Rome. The political victory degenerates into a cross between a hippie love-in and a Mardi Gras parade, with the rowdy and carnal celebrants dancing in masks and simulating sexual acts. Davies' textured Caesar reveals inward terror - but a carefully posed visage - when he is served the goat with no heart on a rolling cart, and he pours himself a brandy but shatters the snifter at the notion of being "afraid." In public, he and Calphurnia are waylaid by a legless soothsayer pushing himself along on a beggar's wheeled cart - his long gray hair filthy and foul and partly wrapped in a bandana - as their guests wield champagne flutes and delight in bowls full of flower petals. Caesar's right hand, Mark Antony, is dopey-eyed in a mustache and seems to share a bond with the rag-tag commoners. The crowd shuffles like zombies, their backs always to the audience, shambling about and murmuring to one another. The conspirators appear in the next scene, oddly attired in modern business suits, but with the long hem of a colorful toga beneath their jackets. The almost-modern design is awkward at best, a clumsy combination of styles that draws too much attention.
A military police soldier - dressed in riot gear and carrying a sidearm - notices a couple of men speaking furtively with one another and records their names in a small notebook, a daunting Big Brother-like insight into Caesar's new regime. When cheers for Caesar rise offstage, Cassius becomes enraged - open-shirted and wielding a dagger, his countenance always stern - while Brutus only appears concerned, an interesting difference in reaction. While the rumbling rise of an offstage storm can be heard to approach, the two politicians are joined by a sardonic old Cassius, sipping champagne and commenting dryly on the seemingly inevitable coronation of Caesar. Swirling images are projected on an overhead canopy, the disturbing depictions like tormented souls in hell.
Ben Carlson's conflicted Brutus is shown 2.1 at home, the marble steps removed for Brutus' courtyard, the banners replaced with tree silhouettes. Carlson's Brutus sadly cradles a candle, shares an intimate moment with Portia - clad only in a bath towel - then listens as Lucius softly sings. Clearly the tragic focus of MacDonald's production, Brutus is soon confronted with conspirators wearing trench coats, standing in shadows upstage, the brims of hats pulled down over their eyes. They approach and reveal that they wear alabaster Mardi Gras masks, and after Tom Rooney's Cassius drives the coup d'état - his Roman conspirator as eager to disrupt the status quo as his mod-rocker Puck in the Festival's in-repertory A Midsummer Night's Dream - MacDonald's production reaches its peak. Davies' wise Caesar sees the assault coming and gamely fends off the first several of his attackers, but he is soon overwhelmed, and when Brutus approaches for the death blow, he reaches out and snares Brutus by the wrist. The famous "et tu Brute?" is a wrenching death rattle, followed hard by one of the killers slipping on the growing puddle of stage blood.
Jonathan Goad's Antony, fearlessly facing a band of assassins that seem as though they may fall upon him at any moment, sinks ("butchers!") to the upstage steps. Goad's best scene follows, with an unruly crowd assembling both onstage and throughout the audience, peppering the speeches from Brutus and Antony with shouted comments, catcalls, and then words of encouragement. Goad's strident Antony brings Caesar's body to center stage upon a bier beneath a purple flag, and when he dramatically yanks the flag aside, Caesar's bloody wounds are revealed, and he wins the heart of the crowd. Antony watches commoners approach - "now let it work" - one trying in vain to clean the blood but only smearing a red stain across the bier, before the interval is reached with the 3.3 mob-beating of Cinna the Poet, who - to the discordant strains from a piano - is set upon, encircled, beaten then upended, before being stabbed to death. MacDonald's strong images are powerfully wrought, a stylish and compelling first half despite some awkward costuming.
The second act does not fare nearly as well, a discordant sequence of strangely staged battle scenes that loses focus on the characterizations - and intense personal conflicts - of the first act. The second half begins with Antony and Octavius Caesar planning their invasion, poring over a military map that is oddly projected on an upstage screen from a camera over Antony's shoulder. The map reveals little, adding only a head-scratching oddity to the production and seems just disconcerting boast of a big budget. Octavius wears a black leather jacket over a dark shimmering toga, but even more strange is the suddenly - and jarringly incongruous - depiction of Antony as crass and sexist: he accepts a brandy snifter from a female soldier, then swats her bottom suggestively with a binder of documents. She glares at him and exits, the scene a poorly played insight into the character that comes from nowhere and is not developed any further. Worse, MacDonald then focuses on a series of anti-war images and combat preparation that dull the impact of the first act. An array of modern soldiers lie crumpled onstage, an evocatively lit cluster of battlefield dead, but the soldiers suddenly rise to depict bivouacking infantry men, and 4.3 Brutus and Cassius pour themselves coffee from a thermos then brandy while in their tent as if on a hunting party rather than mired in a battlefield. They and their army wear modern combat fatigues and carry automatic rifles, and when Cassius offers a conciliatory toast, the distracted Carlson's Brutus fails to even notice the raised glass.
MacDonald's second act lurches forward with much military posturing - amid stage fog and upstage lighting like a distant bombardment - amplified voices echo to the sound of helicopters roaring past. There is a sense that this a monumental global conflict, but the staging - amid an interesting but invasive piano score - is frantically paced and seems much ado about nothing, especially distanced from the conflicts so strongly portrayed earlier in the production. Antony's army - attired all l in black with visored helmets and automatic weapons like a modern-day SWAT team or riot police - make much empty trash talk before the ghost of Caesar appears to curse Brutus and the assassins. Then MacDonald's production completely falters, with not one or two or even three meaningless battle depictions, but four, before the concluding military suicide of the noble Brutus. First, soldiers standing onstage before an upstage background of blood red suddenly but silently fall to the stage as if killed by a soundless explosion, then Cassius kneels and crosses his arms, the flag concealing his head and face, as the sounds of shelling boom in the background. Next, one of his fellow assassins rushes across the stage, pursued by a half-dozen of Antony's black-clad soldiers with automatic rifles. When the assassin turns and draws a dagger to defy them, they for some reason all stop and unsling their rifles and place them on the ground, absurdly drawing their battle knives (for a supposedly fair fight of six men against one). Then, most confusingly in a long stretch of head-scratching scenes, a group of soldiers marches toward the audience, all holding metallic cylinders over their head. They stop downstage as black cloth unfurls from the cylinders, concealing them, perhaps like the drapes over the coffins of battlefield dead, but perhaps something else. The image serves only to confuse the audience. Finally - and gratefully - Carlson's pained Brutus arrives 5.5, and his poignant words are superbly delivered but come across as dull and tiresome in this, the fifth consecutive battlefield scene. When he finally succumbs, Antony appears, all in black, and in a sudden snowfall on the dark battlefield, MacDonald's second act concludes, a disappointingly empty sequel to a compelling and well-acted first half.