Riffs on Shakespeare: machomer
soulpepper
the national post

If the Simpsons were to take it into their heads to do a Macbeth spoof, they would probably make it one segment in a Halloween special and dispatch it in 10 minutes. They would almost certainly do it with great wit, and they might even manage to tell us something subversively instructive about the play itself.

Now consider Rick Miller's one-man show MacHomer, an international fringe hit for the last half-dozen years, now brought back to Toronto under the auspices of Soulpepper. (On the strength of his performance in Present Laughter, Miller now counts as a Soulpepper actor, and a good one.) It is all on its own and lasts an hour. It has only one idea in its head: to do a cut-down but largely authentic version of the original play in which all the roles are supposedly played by characters from The Simpsons.

If you're going to do a funny-voiced Shakespeare parody, you might at least have the grace to invent your own voices; all Miller is doing here is stealing somebody else's jokes. It's like the worst of old radio variety, or a desperate night at a comedy club. Macbeth and The Simpsons are both great texts but Miller has not made them illuminate one another, comically or otherwise. The limit of his verbal invention is to have his Homeric Macbeth wonder if that is a pizza he sees before him. Compare that to what the Simpsons themselves did with A Streetcar Named Desire or The Crucible or even, momentarily, the Witches scene from Macbeth. ("If it were left to you, there'd be nothing in the cauldron but newt-eye.")

Even on a voice-impersonation level the show doesn't work very well. Miller does an excellent Mr. Burns and Smithers (cast as Duncan and Malcolm) and a good Barney (an unlikely Macduff) but some of the others are very approximate. He seems unduly smitten with his impression of the tedious Captain McCallister, of whom we hear a great deal and who, since he plays First Witch, starts the proceedings off. Nor can Miller get very close to the real Homer. (He may be in good company; if you watch early Simpsons episodes, you notice that it took Dan Castellaneta a good two seasons to get the voice and character absolutely right. Since then, of course, nothing has been able to stop him: not even the frequently rotten scripts of the last few seasons.)

Homer plays Macbeth, for no better reason than that each is the protagonist of his own drama. So Marge, of course, plays Lady Macbeth, and here the show really runs into trouble because the two marriages have nothing in common. Can you imagine Marge urging her husband to murder? If you want to imagine it, you'll have to riff far more creatively on the original script than Miller has even attempted.

The Macbeths famously have no children, which means Bart and Lisa are here confined to playing Banquo's son Fleance and Lady Mac's waiting gentlewoman. In the latter role, Lisa enters expressing her disdain for the crass commercialization of the whole enterprise. Yes, that is what Lisa would say. That is exactly what Lisa would say. But this show can't find any fresh way of having her say it. It throws in all the familiar characters simply so fans can cross them off their lists. I mean, our lists. But I can hear these voices, practically 24 hours a day and far better done, without leaving home. What's the point?

The show's last Toronto outing was at Second City's Tim Sims Playhouse, virtually a cabaret space, and the move up in the world has not helped. It merely creates unreasonable expectations. There is now classier video footage behind the actor and a smoking cauldron thing for him to declaim from. There also seem to have been some changes in the script, which neither help nor hinder; I can't swear to it, but I don't remember encountering Sideshow Bob before, or the director character Jon Lovitz voiced in the immortal Oh Streetcar episode.

(Have you noticed, by the way, how Springfield keeps expanding and contracting? One week it seems to be a small town in which everyone attends the same church and sends their children to the same school. The next it's a metropolis with its own Lower East Side. If you deduce from this digression that I would rather be writing about The Simpsons than about MacHomer, you are right.)

In losing intimacy, the performance has lost some redeeming charm. Miller's speed and energy in keeping it going remain undeniable. But it is a stupid show, and Soulpepper has no business producing it.