#macbetto

[nowiamquietlywaiting]

[shakespearenews]

[shakespearenews]

[shakespearenews]

Review: A fine, spooky ‘Macbeth’ at Lyric Opera fights deliciously with our current recovery narrative

A creepy ‘Macbeth’ in Chicago fights deliciously with the recovery narrative so common in the arts. Here you had a night of healing togetherness followed by an opera in which the heavens unleash toil and trouble.

It’s a clever, moralist ending, matched by the constant presence of spooky kids who look partly like refugees from the Addams Family and partly likely those avatars of want who hide under a ghost’s cloak in “A Christmas Carol.” If you can forgive a few clunks, and a long set change needlessly occasioned by the provision of folding tables, it all is of an invigorating piece.

[shakespearenews]

Sound and fury, signifying something: singing Verdi’s Macbeth

Verdi’s opera is not Shakespeare’s play set to music. It’s a different, but equally beautiful, tangle of colour and emotion, and its lead role is one I am still – after many years – getting to grips with

To my mind, opera – and musical theatre – does function in a different way to “straight” theatre. Consider the Shakespeare plays. Monumental literary works written at the end of the 16th century, when we are led to believe that the English language and vocabulary was at its richest. Plays are perhaps linear things. Language, a linear conceit, and words flowing in this or that direction. Gorgeous Shakespearian text, cascading in from the ether on to a steel hawser travelling from point A to point B.

What then is musical theatre, or opera? I think of it as a kind of synesthesia, where all the senses are mixed into a great tangle of truths. The great gobbets of information, of colour and emotion: harmonies and melodies, swirl around in a kind of amorphous cauldron of information: some of it literal and some abstract.

[shakespearenews]

Angela Bassett and Alec Baldwin as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth

Slaughter is a game for the soldiers here. They get drunk and giddy on bloodshed, laughing and applauding at each other's lurid accounts of killings. When Macbeth and Banquo (Liev Schreiber) first show up, fresh from the triumph of battle, they're like star high-school athletes after a football game. Macbeth, in a surprising and inspired bit of business typical of Mr. Wolfe, even rides Banquo piggyback around the stage.

[shakespearenews]

Niblo’s Garden, Yiddish Broadway and the American Musical - New York Almanack

In cities with growing populations and increased prosperity during the 18th and 19th centuries, the demand for amusement venues rose dramatically.

In 1825, William Niblo transformed a square block on Broadway into a pleasure garden lit by hanging lanterns. Later renovations included a theater where in April 1850 he presented America’s premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth with the legendary Italian operatic soprano Antonio Bosio as Lady Macbeth.

Theatrical historians have pointed to Niblo’s Garden as the birthplace of the modern musical.

[shakespearenews]

Costume designer Suttirat Larlarb’s sketch of Lady Macbeth’s costume in Macbeth.