MacHomer

MacHomer is a one-person play by Rick Miller which blends William Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth with the animated television series The Simpsons.

According to Miller, The Simpsons creator Matt Groening is a fan of the play and gave him permission to perform it.

He said, "That's a small role, so I had a lot of time to sit backstage and concoct ideas, one of which was to make fun of our production.

By then, The Simpsons had become a big part of pop culture, so I decided to do the voices of those cartoon characters in my mangled version of the play.

The rest is a mix of ‘Simpsonisms.’"[2] At first, he "did the show as a sort of brutally edited Coles Notes version of the play," while still keeping the language.

The TV show's lasted because it has this basic humanity, while the play is one of Shakespeare's shortest, bloodiest works and has some of his best-known lines.

At the 2000 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the cast members of the television series were performing a special reading of dialog that featured their characters.

According to Miller, "next thing I knew, Matt Groening was shaking my hand, was giving me his blessing and was telling me he'd do all he could to help me continue my show.

[9] MacHomer features, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, "clever rearrangements of lines, crosscuttings between scenes, sometimes topical interpolations and assignment of roles to cartoon entities [...].

According to critic Nelson Pressley of The Washington Post, "you have to give MacHomer awfully high marks for technical difficulty.

"[12] Nelson Pressley of the Washington Post called Miller's performance a "vocal tour de force", but wrote that "like a guy busting a cinder block with his forehead, Miller awes more than he delights, so it's nice that he adds value at the end by serving up hilarious vocal impressions of singers ranging from Tom Waits to Andrea Bocelli.

"[10] Writing for the Modesto Bee, Lisa Millegan felt that "If any of the actors from The Simpsons ever quit, the producers should call Miller to fill in.

"[11] Jason Blake of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote that "Miller is adept at nailing the voices, and extraordinarily fast when switching between them.

His impersonation of Dan Castellaneta's Homer is probably the least accurately focused of the set but his Marge is creepily spot-on, as is his Barney Gumble.