JULIUS CAESAR

The design moves across three registers: Caesar’s own intimate, fumbling acoustic guitar; the polished, orchestrated city-PA versions of the same songs (“populism as production value”); and tinny headphone bleed leaking into public catastrophe. The unifying rule is that the private always escapes into the public. Rome is a single grounded world in the key of the late 1960s through early 1980s, analog and pre-digital, and music crosses freely between the world of the play and the audience. A children’s-cries motif rides every storm and inverts at the finale into children laughing freely: accumulated grief becoming the sound of freedom. In the open-air amphitheatre, gunshots came through practical FM radios, and the roaring crowd came both from speakers hidden in the trees and from cast members placed in the audience.