World War I-style biplanes bomb a restaurant, orphaning the proprietor\u2019s daughter. French newspaper headlines warn of the advance of Macbeth\u2019s army and urge resistance. The girl flees into a tangled forest, where she\u2019s kindly taken in by a witch, who has her help with cooking at her mill cottage and gathering spotted mushrooms for soup, and eventually teaches her magic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So begins \u201cThe 4th Witch,\u201d<\/a> a dazzling shadow puppetry spectacle that tells a \u201cgenre-bending inversion of Shakespeare’s \u2018Macbeth,\u2019\u201d a simple fable that loosely remixes imagery from the classic play\u2014<\/em>the three witches, the blood-stained hands that won\u2019t come clean. Chicago\u2019s Emmy-winning Manual Cinema<\/a> is performing the show at ArtsEmerson’s Emerson Paramount Center in Boston from Oct. 30 to Nov. 9, 2025. The smooth, polished effect of the show\u2019s black, white and red silhouettes is like a silent animated movie of revenge and betrayal\u2014in the neighborhood of the cut-paper silhouette puppet animated films of 20th century German director Lotte Reiniger<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n