More Revivals This Way Come When Shakespeare Steps In, What’s Left Out? by Jason Zinoman

Do we really need another “Macbeth” right now?

A new revival, this one starring Ethan Hawke, opened on Nov. 21, four months after the previous Broadway production,starring Alan Cumming, closed. If you fail to see Mr. Hawke reveal what life, which as we know is full of sound and fury, signifies, not to worry: Kenneth Branagh will fill you in next spring, when he brings his production of “Macbeth” to New York.

Classics return quicker than ever these days. (“A Raisin in the Sun” opens in the spring a decade after the last Broadway production.) But high-profileShakespeare seems to arrive with the speed of pies on an assembly line. The first three years of this decade have already brought us only one fewer Shakespeare revival on Broadway than in the entire previous decade (which had two “Macbeth” revivals) and the same number as in the 1990s (when we survived somehow without any productions of “Macbeth”).

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