MacBeth Kills Verdi
He was supposed to kill King Duncan, but in Bernard Uzan’s production at the Dallas Opera last night the real victim was the composer. I’m sorry I didn’t go earlier, so I could have warned you not to. Tatiana Serjan made a beguiling Lady MacBeth (the original Cruella de Vil), but even her looks, voice, and performance could not overcome the silliness that surrounded her. The Italian Risorgimento costuming led one to expect Garibaldi to come prancing in at any moment. The set design was faux Richard Miers-styled natural history museum. But it got worse. Production designer Robert Israel believes in Symbolism with a capital S. So skulls were randomly set up on blocks of stone (the opera is about death, see) and a creeping homo sapien skeletion was stenciled on the wall (men are animals, get it?).
Dallas rented the set and costuming from the Seattle Opera, where Uzan and Israel must have first foisted this little exercuse in juvenilia. Those Seattle people aren’t dumb. They figured out a way to get their money back. My question is, who in Dallas was dumb enough to give it to them?
Awards | Archives | Reprints | Custom Publishing | Jobs | Advertiser's Index
After reading this, something tells me that Wick and Dennis Miller could have a long conversation about an infinate number of things.
like how to spell “infinite”?
Wick, you are very rich and very disconnected.
I like painting with broad strokes. Details like spelling boar me. (intentional) There is no spell check on the blog window.
JB, we all have skeletions in our closets: one of yours must be a disregard for spelling.
You forgot the scene where Lady MacBeth gets cranky, irritable, and unusually moody and then Symbolic Blood starts slowly dripping all around her, because that was by far my favorite Symbolic part.