Best Shakespeare in a while! The website version here.
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Macbeth in the park was compelling, Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo sensational
The Shakespeare in the Park program has long been a staple of New York City’s theater landscape, its free-admission productions notable not only for the crowds they draw, but also for the marquee names in leading roles over the years. Denzel Washington played the physically deformed Richard III in 1990. John Lithgow was the titular monarch in King Lear in 2014. Anne Hathaway took on Viola in Twelfth Night in 2009—a part later essayed by Lupita Nyong’o in the 2025 revival.
Makati City’s fledgling version of that program, launched a year ago with Twelfth Night, has yet to boast an Oscar winner as headliner. But even better: It has had Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo.
In the recent three-show run of Macbeth, Lauchengco-Yulo was absolutely sensational as the titular character’s power-hungry wife, whose Machiavellian scheming sets into motion a series of murders that ultimately leads to her and her husband’s fatal undoing. This was a Shakespearean performance of the highest order: lucid in its psychological trajectory, constantly alive with emotional contradictions, and unfailingly precise in its command of language.
Watching Lauchengco-Yulo tackle the role of Lady Macbeth was like hearing it performed for the first time—out of the classic text, she spun ravishing music, and the clarity of her interpretation was unsurpassable.
When Lauchengco-Yulo launched into her character’s iconic soliloquy, calling upon the spirits to “unsex” her very being and grant her the inhumanity to commit murder, the scene registered as a tempestuous summons to every force in existence—living or otherwise, seen or invisible, benevolent or unholy.
At Ayala Circuit Park, where I caught the open-air production’s closing night last Oct. 4, the monologue uncannily felt like a diabolical prayer unleashed into the bare open sky. It was breathtaking to behold.
I could say the same for the entire production, which retained the original script’s Early Modern English, but had essentially been spliced by Nelsito Gomez to its barest bones. Running at a heady 75 minutes, this meat-of-the-matter treatment kept the essentials of Macbeth intact—the tale of a general who acts on a prophecy and murders his way to the royal throne was still all there—but now the psychodrama was amplified to near-operatic intensity, and much of the underlying comedy rendered conspicuous as a result.
It’s a gamble that paid off handsomely: The whole thing felt like a stroke of pure artistic genius and was honestly some of the most compelling theater I’ve seen this year. It was also one of the best productions of Shakespeare I’ve had the pleasure of watching in the metro.
Newcomers to the Bard probably wouldn’t have noticed anything unusual in Gomez’s version— “wouldn’t,” because the splicing was obvious to anyone familiar with the Shakespearean classic.
And yet—as with Lauchengco-Yulo’s Lady Macbeth—it felt like encountering the play anew. Not a minute was wasted in Gomez’s airtight storytelling; his cuts were not only efficient, but also intelligent and sensical, the production logically sliding from one scene to the next, from one dastardly monologue to another—sometimes making for an altogether richer whole.
A particularly striking instance: Late in the play, Lady Macbeth, now dead by her husband’s hand, smothered by him in an attempt to literally silence her grief-stricken madness after she witnessed the orchestrated murders of Lady Macduff and her infant. Cradling his wife’s lifeless body in a kind of reverse Pietà, and nearly consumed by the horror of his uxoricide, the king broke into his “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” monologue. It’s a smart, economical change that ratcheted up the sheer theatricality of the moment.
In fact, with the psychological elements of the tragedy—especially its protagonists’ descent first into delusion, then into madness—made all the louder in so short a time, the play achieved legitimate, edge-of-your-seat thriller status. Or, to be more accurate, it somehow became the equivalent of a popcorn blockbuster: Shakespeare served in gleaming bold letters for the largest possible audience to eat up in the most accessible venue possible.
As a public engagement initiative, the production undoubtedly fulfilled its main objective. When Macduff finally defeated Macbeth, slicing his throat with a long blade while surrounded by the ghosts of those the latter had killed, the audience swiftly burst into rapturous cheers and applause.
The reduced running time also served a practical purpose: It minimized the outdoor production’s vulnerability to the weather. Not a drop fell during the entire performance (it rained two hours later).
Otherworldly distance
The design in general was made to adapt to the different venues (the first two shows were held at Ayala Triangle Gardens, Oct. 2–3). At Ayala Circuit Park, Ohm David’s stage was the central object of the mostly open field, a raised platform sparsely framed by vertical LED strips that glowed in different hues to indicate changes in mood or scene. But the existing natural environment was also incorporated into the scenography: the few surrounding trees adorned with fairy lights, and—in what felt like an almost providential stroke of scenographic luck—a small mound with a lone tree directly opposite the stage turned into a promontory where the prophesying witches first appeared to Macbeth, the rows of silent spectators seated in the wide gulf between stage and mound helping to conjure the illusion of otherworldly distance.
From the stage, Macbeth aimed his flashlight at the promontory, the better to see the witches, who sported plain masks—just two of several modernist touches to an iteration of the Bard’s play that cared little for specifics of era beyond the language. Sarah Facuri and Hershee Tantiado dressed the full ensemble in black and gray, save for Lady Macbeth, who was in plain kilts (the Lady’s dressed to kill like a company executive).
Later, the ghost of Duncan walked through the audience toward the stage, taunting a panicked Macbeth with a digital clock counting down to his fatal downfall—a device, it bears mentioning, that seemed indebted to Robert Icke’s reimagining of Oedipus. And throughout, rhythmic, haunting percussion intermittently punctuated the air, notably when the characters retreated into their minds, or struggled with a life-altering decision, or weighed the possible consequences of their plans (Gomez doubled as sound designer). The witches spoke in eerie, breathy, sibilant whispers that permeated the field, to chilling effect.
Single nervous system
Gomez was also director, by the way. And his was an ensemble that shared a single nervous system, every performer in sync with the vision of his production. That they fully mined the drama was but expected; that they landed the comedy every single time was the wonderful surprise.
The one-liners were gold. Lauchengco-Yulo was a master of dishing these out seemingly at random, oftentimes in response to Tarek El Tayech’s Macbeth—a brawny tough guy prone to easy bursts of shrill hysteria. Cleaning up after him in the wake of Duncan’s murder, she barked at him: “Infirm of purpose!” Then, a bit later, trying to snap him out of his guilt-ridden daze: “Be not lost so poorly in your thoughts!” There’s nothing quite like gloriously bitchy English for putting a man in his place.
In Macbeth’s final hour, a foot soldier warned him, “There are 10,000!”—referring to Malcolm and Macduff’s approaching army. To which El Tayech responded with appropriately misplaced snark: “Geese? People?”
One could say it’s precisely because Gomez’s cast delivered every instance of comedy—fleshing out its nuances, landing its beats—that the tragedy hit all the harder. Such was the case, for example, with Cholo Ledesma’s Macduff, who unexpectedly emerged as the most sympathetic character of this Macbeth. In that crucial scene, Gomez afforded Ledesma the rare luxury of time to let his character’s grief unfold—the initial denial, the stuttering disbelief, and the accumulating rage upon learning of his family’s murder. And Ledesma was devastating.
Then, there was Lauchengco-Yulo. In an exclusive interview with TheDiarist.ph last year, the actress revealed she’d yet to do Shakespeare in her illustrious career. Consider her Lady Macbeth a precious gift, then: How lucky we all were to be in that park, witnessing one of the foremost—and most generous—theater performers of her generation take on a role of such magnitude, entirely for free. (And so soon after her tremendous Maria Callas in Philippine Opera Company’s Master Class back in May.) Accidental onlookers at either venue of the play could never have known the good fortune that had befallen them.
In this vein, I am reminded of an imperfect parallel at Bonifacio Global City (BGC) a decade ago. Between 2016 and 2017, 9 Works Theatrical partnered with Globe Live (the telecom giant’s entertainment division) and staged three productions at a newly erected open-air theater located next to the Globe Iconic Store, at the opposite end of High Street from Serendra Mall. Long dismantled, the Bonifacio High Street Amphitheater hosted the Philippine premieres of the Broadway musicals American Idiot and Newsies, as well as two runs of Alan Menken and Lynn Ahrens’ A Christmas Carol.
Entering the theater proper itself required a paid ticket, but beyond the barriers, one could technically watch the show for free—seated on the landscaped steps or outside one of the many dining outlets in the area. From a certain distance, one could clearly see the balletic paperboys of Newsies executing their high leaps and pirouettes, or listen to the disillusioned rockers of American Idiot belt out their rage and love, to borrow the lyric, as they scaled the multi-level skeletal set back and forth.
I’m not quite sure how effective Macbeth and the Shakespeare in the Park initiative was as a form of accidental theater, actually. The casual passerby who wasn’t a regular theatergoer might not exactly be the perfect audience for a play spoken in Early Modern English—and indeed, I spied several people leaving at various points early in the show. But the sizeable turnout itself was already heartening, suggesting that people will show up to this, bringing their own mats and snacks and whatnot, and, in communion with those around them, collectively build a physical theater out of a vast expanse of grass.
Future iterations of this program might want to consider going beyond the name and putting on something in Filipino, for genuine accessibility. Imagine the crowdpleasers of the Virgin Labfest, for example: Mula sa Kulimliman and its laugh-a-minute superhero antics; the Catholic school hysterics of Sa Babaeng Lahat; even the largely mindless but somehow politically inflected plate-throwing of Taksyapo!. Imagine the endless squabbling of the three protagonists in Fangirl echoing all over Circuit Makati. The possibilities are endless.
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