Whether we were rubbing elbows with Oscar-winning starlet Anna Paquin while on the coat check line or sitting behind literary lion Jonathan Lethem on a shuttle bus, it was impossible for GO Girl to avoid being jostled by celebrities at Tuesday’s gala benefit for the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
It was a big night out for this party girl, who had thought her martini-slinging days were over with the arrival of her bundle of joy (not his real name) last year. But all things must pass — including post-partum depression — and GO Girl happily slipped on her fur coat (easy there, feisty, animal-loving vegetarians, it’s vintage) and braved the snowstorm to see whether the fuss over the Chichester Festival Theatre’s production of “Macbeth” was warranted.
More important, perhaps, GO Girl wanted to see if the rumors about the famously jinxed Shakespeare play were already wrapping its cold fingers of bad luck around the production.
But she was soon warmed by the jaw-dropping display of opulence inside the theater. GO Girl was escorted down its aisles by her Arm Candy to the stage, where the Great Performances catering team had lived up to its name by decorating dozens of candlelit tables with dagger centerpieces, a not-so-subtle hint of the blood that was about to soak the actors.
GO Girl’s tablemate, Michael Showalter, was fashionably late, but happy to spark up a conversation. While putting away a portobello mushroom appetizer and an entree of arctic char in mere seconds, he confessed that he lives across the street from the Fort Greene institution, and so he was able to time his arrival perfectly. Showalter then regaled her with a free, utterly deadpan stand-up routine — perhaps not so surprising, as Showalter can be seen co-hosting a comedy show on Sundays at Union Hall in Park Slope.
The star-writer-director of the 2005 film “The Baxter” said he gladly braved the evening’s horrific snowstorm.
“I’ve heard of the person who wrote tonight’s play,” he said. “I heard he’s very good.”
Diners were soon ordered to put down their wine goblets and board the shuttle buses to travel the one-and-a-half-blocks from the opera house to the BAM Harvey, where the tragedy of Shakespeare’s “Scottish play” was about to unfold.
It’s a wonder that Patrick Stewart agreed to return to the borough and lose his head as Macbeth, given that the former captain of the starship Enterprise had some uncomfortable memories of his 1971 BAM debut as Snout in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“I was just saying on the drive over how different things were [in Brooklyn],” Stewart told GO Girl, explaining that he and the rest of the “Dream” cast had bunked in Manhattan. “The company was so nervous to come here. We were bussed across the bridge to the theater. And before we were bussed back to safer Manhattan, they would do a head count. I think we had minders to see we didn’t get into any trouble.”
Stewart has passionate fans from his work on “Star Trek,” and GO Girl quickly decided she was a Stewart groupie, too, as director Rupert Goold’s Soviet-themed version of “Macbeth” unfolded. Easily wooed by a man in uniform and slack-jawed by the 67-year-old thespian’s ability to fill out those tight pants and riding boots, GO Girl decided she was willing to risk violating her marital prime directive to someday canoodle with Captain Picard.
At intermission, GO Girl looked around at the corral of celebrities around her — including Mikhail Baryshnikov — but chose to ask rocker Lou Reed and his gal-pal and BAM stage-veteran Laurie Anderson their opinions of this unconventional show.
“I never miss an opportunity to see ‘Macbeth,’ ” Reed told GO Girl. “I’d rather see ‘Macbeth,’ as opposed to reading it.”
GO Girl had to agree. And this production had stunning costumes for Kate Fleetwood, who played Lady Macbeth with chilling, murderous determination.
At the post-show dessert reception on the opera house stage, Fleetwood told GO Girl that she also worried about the curse attached to the play.
Indeed, at one point in the play, Fleetwood actually got “stuck” — albeit briefly — in an on-stage elevator. Equally as briefly, she wondered whether she had become a victim of the “Macbeth” curse.
“I got stuck in the lift, at the point where I’m saying, ‘To bed, to bed, to bed,’ ” she recalled, now safe with a drink from director-husband Goold in her hand. “It’s considered to be an unlucky play, and in this place, with it being such a dark production and everyone running around with guns and knives, we’ve been lucky there haven’t been more accidents.
“The actors were worried that when they ran up the aisles with the knives they would bump into Lou Reed.”
Goold agreed that there is a definite curse on “Macbeth” shows staged in England.
“Only three successful ones ever,” he said. “There are so many more famously bad ones. The last two [Royal Shakespeare Company] ones were awful.” Goold said that he decided to take a very different route, saying that his production was inspired by all the great horror films, from “The Shining” to “Saw.”
“There’s a bit of schlocky stuff from the ’70s,” he said.
Indeed this production did remind GO Girl of the recent Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd” starring Michael Cerveris, who was also in that night’s audience (and like Stewart, is not afraid to boldly go hairless).
Although she was loathe to leave — she could have chatted about the complications of working motherhood with Fleetwood all night — GO Girl’s babysitter had to be relieved, so she took a last sip of Bombay Sapphire, toasted Goold’s bloody good production, and went in search of her gift bag.
