These scenes were better in Boston because the sequence where Lady Macbeth instructed Danvers to poison Lady MacDuff also took place in the sanitarium room with the bathtubs and they created a nice parallel to each other - from a cold and domineering Lady Macbeth being borderline physically abusive to Danvers in order to get her to agree to poison Lady MacDuff to Danvers forcing a naked, shivering and insane Lady Macbeth into the bathtub later in the cycle. There was no Nurse Shaw character in Boston, and Danvers was the one who performed all of the business involving insane Lady Macbeth in the sanitarium and bathtubs. De Winter character (more to come regarding her in a subsequent post) - in the hotel lobby Danvers and De Winter did a silent reenactment of the sequence in the film “Rebecca” where the Second Mrs De Winter drops her glove and the two of them simultaneously reach down to grab it. I mentioned that the Paisley Witch stuff wasn’t there, but Danvers only had one major interaction with the Second Mrs. She was too busy being terrifying and scaring everybody.
How? For one thing, she didn’t spend long stretches of time in Boston folding goddamn sheets. As a result, Danvers became one of the “less physically demanding” roles in New York and, boy howdy, Danvers has suffered for it. Davis played the role in both Boston and New York (Tori Sparks originated the role in Boston - Hope took it over once Tori started playing Lady Macbeth and is, if I’m being totally honest, the only performer I like in the role), it’s an issue with the New York show’s insistence on having performers “switch off” roles between more physically demanding ones and less physically demanding ones, to facilitate fitting in more shows per week. This is not a performer issue, since the great Hope T. In Boston, Danvers was the scariest motherfucker on two legs - she’d jump around everywhere, she’d tumble down stairwell bannisters (like, with her head on one end of the bannister and her legs on the other end - it was quite a sight), she would just cold grab audience members and start slow-dancing with them while humming spooky songs at them. One of the great tragedies of Sleep No More’s New York production is what they have done to the Mrs. That’s not to say it wasn’t there in any capacity, but it was really downplayed and I never noticed it. Honestly, if any of the Paisley Witch material existed at all in the Boston production of Sleep No More then I never stumbled across any of it. Danvers in the program and there was no connection to any of the Paisley witch stuff. First things first, the character was actually called Mrs.
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