Verdi Sings Shakespeare

There’s quite a long list of operas based on Shakespeare’s work, and the one that comes up the most often, oddly, is “The Tempest”, which apparently spawned eleven operas. I have never heard of any of them.

Only two opera composers tackled Macbeth – Verdi and a French fellow named Ernest Bloch, from the early 1900s, evidently forgotten.

Verdi turned to Shakespeare four times (Macbeth, Otello, and Falstaff, and a music-less libretto for King Lear). Otello and Falstaff capped off Verdi’s long career, but 40 years before that, he wrote up Macbeth, with his reliable librettist Francesco Maria Piave. (Piave also worked on Ernani, Rigoletto, La Traviata, and several others.)

And unlike their heavy handling of the interminable tales of Simon Boccanegra and La Forza del Destino, or the light touch for Il Corsaro, Piave and Verdi wrote Macbeth as a well-constructed and lively tale with the music of duplicity, murder, and ghosts – big fun!

It’s a little odd to hear them singing in Italian, with the supertitles up there printing out familiar lines from Shakespeare’s English, but it works well enough. (No worries; the copyright was from 220 years earlier, so I suppose anyone was allowed to lift the text by the 1800’s.)

Three Adults and a Kid

OK, the queen was great. Here’s a solid soprano, Ewa Plonka, belting it out, and wearing the traditional long queenly dress and basically running all of the castle’s general hospitality, drinking parties, knife murders, and whatnot.

Also, my guy Soloman Howard, singing Banquo and his frightening ghost, and powering the bass lines as always, with his neck gushing blood. Kang Wang as Macduff: the surprise of the night, because if you aren’t tied down in Act 2, here’s a tenor voice that could move you back a few rows. I wish he were Macbeth, not just Macduff.

Because then you have the tenor who’s singing Macbeth. Can I cautiously urge the management not to overdo it here, when they try to present Macbeth as a weak-kneed little husband, cowed and driven by his wife? We get it, he doesn’t wear the pants in this castle. But what we see is just too much adolescence, to the point that I wondered if the guy was simply miscast.

We’re supposed to have a king up there, but he shaves his head like a beer bro in a frat, or even a dropout. Right -- he looks like a late shift fast food manager, or the pool boy. Regular pants and an open white shirt, and then with the suspenders, until he lets them hang. When this guy puts on the crown, we all laugh a bit. No, no, no, little fellow, that thing’s for the grownups.

I’m afraid that even if the costumers did better work, this king would probably still look a bit like a schmo, because of the way he shuffled his feet, fidgeted with his wine glass, and scanned around blankly as if he wished Soloman or Kang would please come over and be the king, so he could go do TikTok. If this was intentional staging, it was over the top.

At the top end of the scale: the dancers. Washington has a great female chorus, and it was infused with four skilled dancing nymphs, choreographed throughout to make it look like everyone can dance, not just those ballerinas. I think they replace David McVicar’s “witches’ pattycake act”, which confused a few of us in the Chicago and New York productions. This way, it really activates the weird sisters.

No Wonder the Little Boy Escaped

Around 50% of the reason I went to DC to see Macbeth is for the wicked Assassins Chorus, where those mean guys creep around in the dark and plot their assault on Banquo and his son. It’s a tightly wound and menacing song, and it’s great. But here, the WNO let me down hard, and I hope they whipped the troops into line before they tried this again on Friday night. Practice up, chorus guys!

Because instead of crisply stabbing their sharp words into the night, while they’re crisply stabbing their sharp knives into Banquo, they muddled through this thing like they were in Beginner Italian, Level 1. Were they all singing the same song that night? Were they all singing? Or were some of them just talking through the lyrics, or chatting with each other? What a mess. Some of those devilish assassins were popping it out tightly along with the orchestra. I don’t know what the rest of them were doing. Too bad!

Don’t Even Think About a Rotating Stage

Then you’ve got the sets, and they are exquisite, as long as we are talking about the woodland scenes, with the witch girls doing their stuff. The hanging drapes and liquid lighting do it right. For the interiors, though, this ancient castle looks like I M Pei modernism, so I am not sure where they are going with that. Kind of a lot of metal and chrome, isn’t it?

How do you change scenes in Macbeth? Because there’s one place in Act 1, and two in Act 2, where we all have to stop and wait while something happens behind the curtain. Chicago (2021) doesn’t know; they just close up for 60 or more seconds, while you shift awkwardly in your seat and listen to the stage people work noisily in the back.

Washington has one answer, and we’re partway there: they drop the curtain and project a quotation from Shakespeare, while they move the castle around very quietly. A little sign warns from above: “A brief pause. Please remain seated.”

That’s better, but my problem is, I am not seated or willing to pause; I am in Scotland watching the queen nag her husband to commit one murder after another, and I don’t want to be urged to remain in V-120 at the Kennedy Center.

It’s hard to believe that nobody can design the castle and the heath in a way that allows for a less interruptive transition. We’ll keep looking.