by Eva Dameron
Daily lobo
"MacHomer" started out as a little cast party joke performed with hand puppets.
"It started out very subjectively," said Rick Miller, the actor in the one-man show.
"MacHomer" is a version of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" performed in the voices of "The Simpsons."
Miller was in "Macbeth" when he thought of the idea.
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"I created it to make fun of our cast," he said.
Then the puppets evolved into Miller and a mic stand at a comedy club. Soon it became a stage production with a director and a designer that is on tour and coming to Popejoy.
"That's the version that we're touring right now which is this full-on, multimedia, smokin' lights version of 'Macbeth' with this video element and a big screen in the back and a lot of light cues and stuff," Miller said.
Miller said after the success of "MacHomer," people made suggestions about doing it with another play. He said he realized "Macbeth" fit the best because a lot of its roles suited 'The Simpsons' characters.
"King Duncan was perfect as Mr. Burns, and Krusty the Clown was perfect as the drunken porter," he said. "Barney was a great Macduff. It just kind of all fell into place."
Miller said Barney is his favorite Simpsons character.
"I think he fits the best in the tragedy because he's got, for lack of a better term, a tragic nobility to him," Miller said.
He also chose "Macbeth" because it is the shortest of Shakespeare's tragedies.
"The story moves pretty quickly," Miller said. "It has a lot of jokes in it, but it is one concept stretched out through the play, so we needed a short play. And we needed a tragedy, because you can't really parody a comedy."
Miller said he often mixes things that seem to not go together at first.
"That's how I create," Miller said. "I throw things together in a mix and see what happens - if they explode or if they don't. So with 'The Simpsons,' it would seem like it's a pop-culture-versus-high-art collision. But I see it more as bringing Shakespeare back to popular culture, which he was 400 years ago. The audience back then was the TV-watching audience of today."
Miller said he had the chance to meet Matt Groening, the creator of "The Simpsons," and the voice actors. They met at a festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he performed his show for a month.
"He had heard of my show and had heard it was a lot of fun," Miller said. "He gave me his blessings to do it. And all the other actors led me around like a party trick. It was a very interesting evening and a lot of fun."
Miller said he doesn't consider "The Simpsons" run-of-the-mill animation.
"There are some people who think it's just a stupid cartoon," Miller said. "But those are people who just don't look beyond the obvious."
He said sometimes people can be closed-minded about Shakespeare as well.
"There are also some people who hate Shakespeare, certainly a lot of high school students do," he said. "It's a level of open-mindedness that you've got to approach 'MacHomer' with. But if you like 'The Simpsons' and you like Shakespeare, you're going to like the show."
He said his performance is well thought out.
"It's a fun and an intelligent way to spend an hour," he said. "Anyone from devout 'Simpsons' fanatics to Shakespeare scholars have really liked 'MacHomer.'"
