The Brooklyn Academy of Music will showcase several notable film adaptations of Shakespeare’s “Scottish play” in April to coincide with its staging of the Whitney White live musical Macbeth in Stride.
In Macbeth in Stride, which runs April 15-27, White uses pop, rock, gospel, and R&B music to trace the fatalistic arc of Lady Macbeth.
As part of BAM’s cinematic Macbeth(s) series lineup, Orson Welles 1948 feature version of Macbeth for Republic Pictures will gets its due, along with Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and the gangster-themed Joe Macbeth from 1956. Also, look for screenings of Scotland, PA; The Damned; and Rave Macbeth.
A 35mm print of Welles’ original cut with the “Scottish burr” soundtrack will be screened on April 12 and 17. Alongside the 1948 feature, BAM will show the only existing footage of Welles’ 1936 stage production of Macbeth, which featured an all-Black cast and set in the Caribbean. The “Voodoo” Macbeth footage comes from the 1937 Work Projects Administration short We Work Again.
Macbeth was an attempt by Welles to make classics on a small budget, hoping that if the motion picture was a success, he would be allowed to do similar projects. The film, shot in just 23 days on a shoestring budget, was unfairly compared to Laurence Olivier’s big budget Hamlet upon its release in 1948 and unfairly attacked by critics.
Two years later, Republic had Welles cut two reels and re-record the soundtrack with the actors speaking in their natural voices, and not the approximation of Scottish accents that Welles initially requested.
That truncated, 86-minute version of the Welles film remained in release until 1980, when the original uncut version with the Scottish-tinged soundtrack was restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Folger Shakespeare Library
BAM screening details and ticket information may be found online at bam.org/film/2025/macbeths
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