Word: macbeth
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...William Shakespeare is the finest author in the English language," notes the Dunster House senior who composed the music for Hasty Pudding Theatricals 147, A Tsar is Born. "The original performances of Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and countless other classic Shakespearen texts featured exclusively male casts. This dynamic was integral to the theatrical tradition in the time of the great William Shakespeare, and it remains so today. What is my point? Simply that HPT 147 was written by William Shakespeare...
Shakespeare, in his prescient wisdom, foresaw the discovery of the late twentieth century Harvard paradigm. What is Macbeth if not the tragic embodiment of acute paradigm dysfunction? He fell victim to a bunch of lunatics who shoved their own illusory paradigms up his paradigm vacuum. He had to be told what paradigms to adopt. His fatal paradigm encompassed the plausibility of entire forests moving by themselves. Since Macbeth was the classic tragic hero, he could be cleansed of his false paradigms only in death. We muse that, at the final moment of truth, he ascends to paradigm purification...
...Metropolitan Opera's new production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is so bright, so impish and in its energy so reflective of the dazzling score it dramatizes that it's a shame to say that it represents a waste of talent. But it does...
...working-class lover boosted Shostakovich's art to a new level of technical assurance and emotional maturity, and at age 25 he appeared well on his way to becoming the most important operatic composer of the century. Then, in 1936, the Soviet authorities denounced the popular Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as "muddle instead of music." Afraid not only for his livelihood but for his life, Shostakovich withdrew the earthy score, replaced it with a pallid adaptation called Katerina Ismailova, and never wrote another opera. It was not until 1979 that the original work surfaced; gradually, it has been replacing...
With an unfamiliar opera that is as powerful as Lady Macbeth, a radical staging is hardly necessary to create freshness and vigor in a production. Shostakovich's music can do that very well on its own, and all of Vick's efforts are more a hindrance than a help...