Word: macbeth
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Next day the New Opera's 100-odd youthful singers turned to polishing up their coming offerings: Offenbach's La Vie Parisienne, Verdi's Macbeth, Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame. They raised Steinway Hall's roof with incessant rehearsals. They were out to prove, once & for all, that opera does not have to be sung by middle-aged tenors and bulging contraltos. Between arias, they hotly argued this revolutionary' idea over hamburgers and milk in the 57th Street Automat. To the participants the New Opera is more than opera: it is a crusade. They came...
...Despite the terrific jump in productions, musicals have not multiplied: ten last season, ten this. Of three U.S. clicks in London, one-The Man Who Came to Dinner-is farce, but Claudia is semiserious, and Watch on the Rhine wholly so. Shakespeare was a sellout when John Gielgud revived Macbeth in July. Shaw has been a hit since Vivien Leigh revived The Doctor's Dilemma in March. (Winston Churchill, a Leigh fan, has seen it twice.) John Gielgud has revived Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, which is a smash, plans to revive Congreve...
...scratch production, Othello had the shrewd, story-must-come-first direction that Margaret Webster also gave to the Maurice Evans Hamlet and Macbeth...
Tragedy, love, passion, characterization, sentimentality, were taboo; "scale and violence" were all that most of the native plays had, and about all that were left of foreign plays, once they were adapted. "Hamlet was played for the murder, the ghost, the burial; Macbeth for the witches, the sleepwalking scene, the knocking at the gate." Some plays "were hardly plays at all but omnibus inclusions of the latest news, the latest partisan arguments." The drama was half operatic, exceedingly oratorical, and stagy oratory was perhaps the greatest and most popular of the arts...
...also nearly ruined Composer Shostakovich. At the height of the Purge, when Russian nerves were badly frayed and people were plopping into prison like turtles into a pond, Stalin decided to hear Lady Macbeth. He did not like it, walked out before it was over. Murder from boredom struck him as a bourgeois idea. Besides, Stalin's musical taste runs to simple, more tuneful things, zigzags between Beethoven's Eroica and Verdi's Rigoletto. Also, he had a seat directly above the brasses...