This starry "Macbeth" is short of bewitchng

Stage Review

NEW YORK — When high-powered Hollywood stars such as Alec Baldwin and Angela Bassett take on Shakespeare, theatergoers feel obliged to be grateful.

It's good for Shakespeare and great for the industry, even if the fringe audience at- tracted to the tantalizing proposition of these two actors in Macbeth (**1/2 out of four) hardly has a prayer of getting tickets. The New York Shakespeare Festival production has a mere two-week run, opening Sunday after four weeks of previews and closing March 29. No extensions are possible — the actors, naturally, have movie commitments.

But Shakespeare's plays don't lend themselves to pit stops. Ralph Fiennes, with his extensive classical theater background, might pull it off, but most other actors, even those as thoughtful and intelligent as Baldwin and Bassett, cannot. What you get are the promising beginnings of characterizations in a multitextured story about a couple who murder their way to the throne.

Granted, their broad outlines are fascinating: Baldwin is a tough, vigorous, red-meat Macbeth, an unlicked bear of a warrior who plows his way to the top spot without the wisdom to handle it. Hence his managerial policy: When in doubt, kill. Sadly, Baldwin lacks the vocal heft for later scenes in which he devolves into a bestial state.

Bassett's Lady Macbeth similarly lacks foresight, crumbling when power becomes an empty acquisition and her husband turns away from her. Within that characterization, though, the details go in and out of focus. Except in her touchingly vulnerable sleep- walking scene, Bassett is oddly impersonal in her long speeches. But some of her silent reactions are amazing, suggesting how fine she could be.

Director George C. Wolfe's production is undercooked. A Spartan design attempts to evoke a society more primitive than Braveheart, and there are appropriately earthy touches in Carlos Valdez's score. But secondary characters are sometimes barely adequate, and moments of magic involving the witches don't come off. It's nothing that a longer gestation couldn't cure, but that's too much to hope for.