Giuseppe Verdi’s speedy-moving and dramatic take (1847, rev. 1865) on Shakespear’s Macbeth will …”blaze with fate’s cruel grip” in Boston Lyric Opera production under the direction of Steve Maler (Founding Artistic Director of Commonwealth Shakespeare Company) and the baton of David Angus (BLO track Director). The cast features powerhouse performances from Norman Garrett (Macbeth), Alexandra LoBianco (Lady Macbeth), David Junghoon Kim (Macduff), and Zaikuan Song (Banquo) on Friday October 10th and Sunday October 12th. Tickets HERE.
A discussion with the stage director Steven Maler follows.
FLE: You are well known as a Shakespearean director of straight drama.
SM: That’s what I do a lot of, for sure. I am the Founding Artistic Director of Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, which has been doing free Shakespeare on the Boston Common every summer, since 1996.
I’ve directed a lot of those productions out on the Common — not all of them, but a lot of them. I have also directed a good bit of opera these days, some contemporary plays, and a little bit in the musical theater space. Shakespeare is certainly a home base for me, and I am excited about how my love for Shakespeare overlaps Verdi’s Macbeth.
Does your stylistic vocabulary imagine “Shakespeare with spears” in addition to “Shakespeare with fascists and machine guns”?
We’ve always strived to find the contemporary references and contemporary reverberations of these plays for our Boston Common audiences. I also understand that there’s a legacy and history to these works as well, but we don’t typically do what I would call “doublets and tights” kind of productions.
I’m more interested in how these plays speak to us today. That means avoiding reductiveness while finding a good balance between bringing the story forward to us, and respecting the source. That’s certainly the way that I’m approaching this piece with BLO in trying to find the contemporaneousness of it.
If you were doing King Lear would you dress the title character as Trump?
That’s exactly what I don’t want to do. I would rather the audience make such imaginative leaps themselves. Once you get into that sort of caricature, you actually reduce Shakespeare radically, by limiting the story to just one particular flawed leader. And there are so many of them.
***
I recently saw the production of Verdi’s Macbeth in Salzburg. Alongside some magnificent playing and magnificent singing I observed some weird and confusing things like Lady Macbeth undergoing an obstetric examination on stage to show that she would be barren.
That’s not going to be in our production! I think the European tradition of the auteur director can sometimes stretch materials beyond recognition. On the other hand, I grew up at the American Repertory Theater under Robert Brustein’s tenure. And I think the best of those directors, like Robert Wilson, JoAnne Akalaitis, Andre Serban, and Anne Bogart to name a few, found something very elegant and pure in terms of their relationship to the material. I’ve seen my share of messy indulgence of all kinds of classical pieces that really don’t serve the material, but I appreciate the effort directors expend to make productions feel personal and bring their own visions to it.
Did you happen to see the Daniel Craig production of “the Scottish play” in New York. I just have to tell you what they did because it was one of the greatest theatrical coups I’ve ever witnessed. It was a modern-dress production, and it started with witches making dinner for the whole cast, and it was very fun and informal. It was mostly a bare stage with props, and I kept looking at the back wall of the theater, with bricks and radiators and conduits and exit signs. Lo and behold, two hours later, the entire (Birnam Wood) back wall moved downstage to Dunsinane. The deliberate movement of that enormous painted flat, was just such a striking moment …plus Daniel Craig can actually act.
***
You cite Anselm Kiefer (contemporary German painter and sculptor of large-scale works) as your visual inspiration for this show. He is a certainly a very emotionally engaged musician, but he hardly depicts Scotland. Is the show going to have a sense of specific place?
I’m generally not too bound by the sense of place and time. When I approach the plays on the Boston Common, I seek the emotional heartbeat of the pieces. As to Kiefer, there’s a lot about his work that deeply moves me, and I think it is that sense of desolation in his canvases. You’ll see, perhaps, a field of crops that appear to have been destroyed by carpet bombing… it expresses the desolation and destruction and despair that war visits on the forgotten ones: the farmers, the shopkeepers, the grunts who actually get chewed up in the maw of the war…the cannon fodder. When I was looking for an inspiration, I wasn’t thinking completely literally. It was more of that emotional connection to his work that I introduced to the design team, and they took it and ran from there.
So, will there be painted flats that look like Kiefer or projections?
We are building a set and we are painting scenery, but I wouldn’t want to co-opt his work in a direct way. We’re rather trying to build a space that suggests the ravages of civil war. The wall itself, the surround itself, feels like it’s been punctured by shrapnel and battered by war.
So it’s a unit set? Is there going to be any clear delineation of indoors versus outdoors?
I’d say yes, it is a unit set. One of the great things about Shakespeare is how he moves you from space to space, and time to time with very little scenery change. He wrote for a bare stage. And this play is one of Shakespeare’s leanest and meanest. It has really no subplots, so the primary narrative drive is pretty relentless. And in some ways, the opera is actually even more efficient than the play itself, eliminating characters and scenes, and streamlining some movements.
We are trying to create a space and an approach to the material that allows the narrative to drive. And, we’ve done some little cuts here and there. For example, we’re not doing the big dance ballet numbers because those are very challenging for us to do in the context we’re in. We’re hoping it’s going to feel very propulsive.
There are a lot of characters. Even with the streamlining and surtitles, it can be challenging to follow the lineages of the various kings and pretenders, and who’s getting revenge. How do you explain these narrative issues in modern dress production without costumes that define rank easily?
It’s not exactly modern dress. We’re more inspired by the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s. So it will feel contemporary to audiences, but I think there are ways within that to define hierarchy, since the show is military-based. This is a culture where even though the women are not in military uniform, there is a kind of a uniform in how one dresses.
There are a couple of challenging narrative ellipses in the opera. For instance, McDuff is a critical character who ultimately kills Macbeth. In Shakespeare’s play, we see his family killed while he’s away in England. In the opera, we don’t see that happen, we just go straight from the chorus of the Scottish refugees to his aria lamenting their loss.
By the way the Salzburg production represented the slaughter of the children on stage.
Yeah, I could see that happening, but we don’t have that capacity to do that in this production. It’s a very speedy process, but the condensation of characters actually makes the narrative more legible for audiences. And ultimately, it is a piece about the effect ambition has on the title character, his wife, and on society in general.
That story in that narrative is easily discernible in the opera, but certainly we’ll be working to make sure it comes across.
Closeup videos of the couple were very effective in the well-acted Salzburg production.
We’re going to anchor the piece in great singing, great storytelling, great acting, and just a beautiful, elegant and emotionally resonant setting that helps advance the story.
And don’t forget, this is a story about female agency…for better or worse.
When I just did it recently, we had an extraordinary Lady Macbeth; she felt it was a love story…a pathological love story for sure. It’s such a powerful role for a female actor and for a female singer. I’m excited to jump into this with the full team, roll up our sleeves and get to work.
***
Everyone loves the Colonial’s qualities except for its small pit. Do you like having the orchestra on the house floor?
I love being able to see the track being made. I’ve done pieces where we put the orchestra on stage quite intentionally. The orchestra is such a thrilling part of this art form.
It challenges balance, of course, because it’s easier to sing over an orchestra in a pit than to soar over one that is seated in the house. Will you be doing amplification?
We are not planning to do any amplification. Rather, we are working with acousticians to design the set in such a way that it actually projects the sound out. I don’t want to reveal too many of our tricks to you, but there’s a big, beautiful semicircular back wall that will have a surprising evolution, while also serving as a modified concert shell. And the general intention is to try bring the singers further downstage. I think there’s something really beautiful and glorious about the unamplified voice, whether singing or speaking.
Re Macbetto (Verdi’s Italian) vs Macbeth (as we English speakers know him), there was some talk about the libretto being retranslated back from French back to Italian back to English. How much that we will read on the titles is actually Shakespeare?
Not very much to be honest with you. It’s quite surprising to see “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…,” which is probably the most famous speech in Shakespeare, and certainly the most famous speech in this play, reduced to four bars of track.
That said, Verdi does put across Shakespeare’s tale of the destructiveness of unbridled ambition, and that journey is deeply resonant and parallel in the narratives. It’s just not in the language of the opera. Verdi echoes Shakespeare’s story, not his language.
***
How many buckets of blood will be spilled?
We’re trying to be quite restrained with that. It can get quite messy once you put it on somebody’s hands and it starts getting all over everything!
So what about those the damn spots?
Yes, yes, yes, well, we’ll see some spots, for sure!
About the Author
