[In the following review of director Yukio Ninagawa's 2002 Japanese-language production of Macbeth, Weber praises the dazzling and elegant qualities of the cast, set, and choreography, but questions the overall depth of Ninagawa's interpretation.]

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the gaudily stylish but undeniably exciting Macbeth being presented as part of the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is that the director, Yukio Ninagawa, is 67 and the best-known director of classical theater in Japan. For in its overall glam visage as well as in many of its hip particulars, it feels very much like the work of an enfant terrible, someone immersed in contemporary aesthetics and given to youthful excess.

The stage is embraced by enormous, angled walls of paneled mirrors, often hazed over with smoke and focused lighting. (Smoke and mirrors, literally.) Mr. Ninagawa has said of the play, “If there is a last day of youth, this is a story that occurs on that night,” and his Lord and Lady Macbeth are unusually young. They are played by Toshiaki Karasawa and Shinobu Otake, vividly beautiful performers with the chiseled cheekbones and gorgeous, calculatedly unkempt coifs of rising movie stars. Actors periodically roar down the aisles to make their entrances (sometimes followed timidly by late-arriving audience members). Two percussionists punctuate the play with rock’n’ roll bombast.

Geography is topsy-turvy and time is telescoped. With the sound of helicopters and machine guns lathered over a jungle set, the opening tableau recalls the Vietnam War, as if the Scots and the Norwegians were fighting at the Equator, suggestions of time and place that are undercut by the arrival of Duncan (Masafumi Sanoo) and Malcolm (Keita Oishi) on horseback. (Real horses!) And throughout, the sounds of modern war accompany the characters' shedding blood with swords and daggers.

Mr. Ninagawa's references to Christianity and martyrdom are so grandiose—like the huge cross of light that hovers over Macduff (Makoto Tamura) as he grieves for his murdered family—that it's hard to know if they're meant sincerely or sardonically. The costumes are of such luster as to elicit the overheard comment in the audience: “Shakespeare meets Vogue.” And the set design is of such clean elegance that even the witches' caldron would be fit for a celebrity loft in TriBeCa.

There seems to be a coup de théâtre, or at least some flashy stagecraft treat, waiting around every corner, whether it is the acrobatically choreographed three-against-one battle that results in the murder of valiant Banquo or Macbeth's lament for his dead wife, “Out, out brief candle,” performed beneath an enormous, swaying chandelier its individual flames extinguishing and recombusting as it moves forward and back, forward and back, barely over his head. Early on, you'll find yourself wondering, “How's he going to do the traveling Birnam Wood?”

There's no question of the dazzle here being entertaining. It's the quickest three hours of Shakespeare you'll ever see, even though you won't understand a word unless you speak Japanese. The production, which has two more performances, tonight and tomorrow night, at the academy's Howard Gilman Opera House, does provide English surtitles, but they're almost beside the point. (A rereading of the play beforehand isn't required, but it is recommended.)

Whether you understand the spoken text or not, this is Shakespeare without iambic pentameter or any other familiar poetic rhythm. The Japanese language, with its syllable-plenitude, and Japanese acting, with its fervid, declamatory idiom provides something wholly different, a whole new music. It takes a while to get used to; at Wednesday's opening performance, several audience members exited very early. (A couple of them nearly jostled Lady Macbeth as she entered, reading a letter from her husband, down the center aisle.)

That was their mistake; even without literal meaning, the language manages to illuminate situation and performance. The actors may be partly cast for their looks—the ensemble is full of terrific-looking people—but they're skilled; they do come through in their words.

Mr. Karasawa's Macbeth is a study in fierce self-questioning, a young man, like Hamlet, with an active conscience but with a different brand of immaturity, tragically impetuous rather than tragically immobile. Ms. Otake, a woman with Audrey Hepburn delicacy, is clothed and lighted so beautifully that you can't take your eyes from her, and that attention is rewarded. Her own eyes glow with the mercenary lust at the prospect of her husband's ascension to the throne, a frightening shallowness that echoes gruesomely when she goes mad with sleepwalker's guilt.

As Banquo, Naomasa Musaka begins as an overly excitable fellow, but by the time of his killing and his ghostly return, he has become a winning emblem of dignity. And Mr. Tamura's Macduff, who doesn't overdo the agony in his grief-stricken reaction to the killing of his wife and children (it's Mr. Ninagawa who overdoes the martyr business with that glowing edifice-size cross), makes a trim, athletic opponent for Macbeth in their mortal confrontation.

This is Mr. Ninagawa's final set piece, and though the fight choreography (by Masahiro Kunii), as it has been throughout the play, is both elegant and vicious, and theatrically fantastical yet sufficiently suggestive of bloody reality, he lets it go on too long. There are several times, in fact, particularly in the second half of the production, that the director slides over the edge of brass and into overblown effect. The scene in which the witches conjure the apparitions that give Macbeth his false sense of security is redolent of “The Wizard of Oz” and unintentionally funny.

Does all this result in revelatory Shakespeare? Well, this is a Macbeth that may have you thinking less about ambition, bloodshed, remorse and retribution than about Hollywood, MTV and the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. But there is a lot to be said for Mr. Ninagawa's show-offy imagination, which is largely what keeps the audience interested and in suspense.