First Nighter: London's Impressive "Macbeth," "The Taming of the Shrew," Charlene James's "Cuttin' It," Daniel Evans's Sizzling "Show Boat"

London--Emma Rice, formerly the joint artistic director of the superb Kneehigh company, is now the Globe Theatre artistic director and offering her first season after the departure of Dominic Dromgoole, who succeeded Mark Rylance.

Judged by the productions of Macbeth and The Taming of the Shrew, she's happy to encourage some of the same offbeat creative notions she pursued with her previous group. She's quoted as saying that when she took the job, she immediately called Iqbal Khan to take on Macbeth, otherwise known to superstitious theater people as "The Scottish play." (An article in the program itemizes the reasons why a tragedy taking place in a bloody Scotland remains much more English in the writing than Scottish. Of course, it does. Shakespeare was English.)

More...