I come not to bury Denzel Washington, but to praise him. Here is a first-rate film actor: a commanding presence, a rich voice, some range, good taste. He makes quality films. I mean, did you see “Training Day”? I wish I had a kid brother, so I could kick him around the way Denzel does Ethan Hawke in that movie.

Mr. Washington is many things, but an especially authoritative Brutus isn’t one of them. At least, not in the revival of “Julius Caesar” that opened at the Belasco last night. Like intermittent thunder, he is sometimes powerful, more often a fuzzy rumble. His Brutus seems a role being essayed, not a character being inhabited. You expect more from an actor whose name gets bigger type in the Playbill than William Shakespeare’s. All right, maybe I do come to bury him.

In an interview in yesterday’s New York Times, Mr. Washington revealed that, before rehearsals began, he spent eight hours a day for a month preparing to play Brutus. A whole month! It might be remarked that playing a monumental role in one of the greatest plays in the language does not lend itself to cramming the way, say, the GRE does. I wouldn’t be much comforted to learn that the cardiologist about to crack me open for a triple bypass had been hitting the books really hard lately. Would you?

Even actors who spend their entire careers in New York learning how to sustain a character for two hours, how to make silence as expressive as speech, how to stand properly onstage – essential skills you’re unlikely to pick up on a backlot – can attempt a role like Brutus and come up short. Mr. Washington, with his handful of stage credits (even a share of an Obie from the early 1980s), doesn’t have the long seasoning to bring him to life.

Vocally, Mr. Washington does justice to the noble Roman: He fills the Belasco with strong, nuanced sound. In fact, he doesn’t seem to realize how much meaning Shakespeare’s verse and his own voice can convey. His speeches are lousy with indicative gestures. When he compares the dangerous Caesar to “a serpent’s egg” during Brutus’s signature soliloquy (a peroration of almost total weightlessness here), he suggests an oval shape with his hands.

One asset that has survived the trip from Los Angeles is Mr. Washington’s charisma. When he’s onstage, it’s hard to pay much attention to anyone else. Yet for someone who has a panther’s grace onscreen, he has a remarkably self-conscious physicality here. You can’t help watching him, even when he seems unsure where to put his hands. He ends up wearing his charisma like a light-up necktie: you are transfixed, even as you are repelled.

The metaphor is strictly metaphorical. In this modern-dress revival – sunglasses, security badges, AK-47s – Mr. Washington wears suits by Valentino, the Shakespeare of haberdasheries. The couture creates fresh difficulties. With somebody as handsome, magnetic, and superlatively dressed as Mr. Washington around, why would the paranoids worry about Caesar?

The last major Broadway revival of “Julius Caesar” was in 1937, when a 22-year-old upstart tyro thrilled crowds with a modern-dress, fascist-themed production. Like Orson Welles, director Daniel Sullivan has found an inspired way to underscore the play’s timeliness. Unless I’m mistaken, the new setting of this story about bloody internecine politics seems to be Sarajevo, 1995. Ralph Funicello’s towering, crumbling scenery depicts an elegant cityscape blasted to rubble. Tinny martial music sometimes wafts in from offstage, where we also hear the roar of mobs. Lacking a Brutus weighty enough to hold the show together (particularly the second half, which is always weaker than the first), the revival doesn’t much captivate. Still Mr. Sullivan, one of the sharpest directors now working, gives us plenty of compelling moments.

In this telling, Caesar is assassinated in a Cabinet meeting, in a conference room reached through a metal detector. The sight of suit-wearing bureaucrats suddenly transformed into butchers churns the stomach with its topicality. The riskiest and most disturbing sight in the whole affair is a grace note of Mr. Sullivan’s invention. At the end of a scene, Marc Antony looks offstage into a bright white light – a television camera. He and some gentlemen in black ski masks proceed to behead their hostage.

Mr. Sullivan musters people on and off with aplomb, though more variety in the death scenes would have helped. As one Roman after another falls on a blade, the stagecraft grows comically predictable. The skewered man will make a sudden turn upstage and utter a loud grunt or moan, as the skewerer indulges in a punk guitarist’s grimace.

Colm Feore anchors the play as an unctuous, silver-tongued Cassius. The always welcome Jack Willis makes Casca shrewd and crude; the walking stick he fancies conceals a blade. Eamonn Walker, Jessica Hecht, and William Sadler are capable if unexceptional as Marc Antony, Brutus’s wife, and Caesar, respectively. Stronger impressions are left by supporting players like Patrick Page, John Douglas Thompson, and David Cromwell, whose Cicero has an air of Moynihan about him.

For all the intelligence of its staging, and the shock of its relevance, there’s a vital pleasure this revival fails to convey. Reviewing a lackluster production of “Julius Caesar” more than a century ago, Shaw wrote: “When we come to those unrivalled grandiose passages in which Shakespeare turns on the full organ, we want to hear the sixteen-foot pipes booming, or, failing them. .., the ennobled tone, and the tempo suddenly steadied with the majesty of deeper purpose.”

Mr. Funicello’s scenery and some of Mr. Feore’s better moments aside, there is no majesty here, none of the elevation we look to the classics to provide. On Broadway lately, you can feel a tacit agreement being reached. A feckless “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” a truncated “Henry IV,” a bungled “Glass Menagerie,” now an unconvincing “Julius Caesar”: It’s as if producers have abandoned hope of finding real greatness in the classics, and audiences have agreed to treat starry mediocrity as an acceptable substitute. Not only in Mr. Sullivan’s bold flourishes is this a “Caesar” for its times.