Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar
Colorado Shakespeare Festival
Mary Rippon Theater
Boulder, CO
June 11 - August 13, 2017


William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar has been highly controversial this year when New York’s Public Theatre performed it with the part of Caesar played by a Donald Trump look-alike. While the Colorado Shakespeare Festival opted for a more traditional toga version, they clearly were not lost on the political implications of the work.

At the beginning of the show, several actors in modern clothes responded to the players on stage as if at a political rally. The meaning was clear – these events could happen again.

From that point, the production was performed as a costume drama. Caesar was clad in a saintly white toga while the rest of the major players wore colorful clothing. There did not seem to be any obvious meaning behind their attire. It did seem strange that they did not wear the traditional red and white Senate robes.

As the two factions formed, the colorful garb was replaced with uniforms of blue and while (the good guys) or black and red (the bad guys). Had they all started off with the unifying Senate robes, the taking of sides may have appeared more dramatic. And they seemed little reason why Marc Antony wore the short toga of a boy, except, perhaps, to harken back to Richard Burton’s attire from the classic film Cleopatra.

The casting was a bit uneven. Brutus was far more charismatic than Caesar. Cassius’s attempt to sway Brutus wasn’t convincing. Marc Antony did seem to grow before our eyes, but his relationship with Octavius seemed to appear out of nowhere.

The staging of the assassination scene was tense and disturbing. But the resulting bloodbath seemed gratuitous. Even though the script called for the conspirators to mark themselves with blood, it did seem over the top. Mark Antony’s post assassination speech delivered from the middle of the audience clearly marked him as a man of the people. However this version did not draw a strong line between the good and the bad. Perhaps that was purposeful.

While the show is interesting, and at times entertaining, it doesn’t have a clear message for the audience.