Word: macbeths
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...everyday event for a woman to rise topless from a large cauldron in Memphis. But when Cheryllynn Ross did so last week as Hecate during the New York-based Metropolitan Opera touring performance of Macbeth, she was risking more than a chill: the city's tough new antinudity ordinance, aimed chiefly at topless dancers, could have brought quick arrest. Two division commanders of the local police were on the scene. Would they rush the cauldron and haul its contents off to the slammer...
...Terra Nova and Sam Shepard's Pulitzer-prizewinning Buried Child and trained performers as diverse as Meryl Streep and Henry Winkler. The company also tried some daffy updating of classics: the 1607 Revenger's Tragedy be came an essay on Viet Nam War protest, the witches in Macbeth came from a spaceship, and The Frogs of Aristophanes frolicked in a Yale swimming pool...
...this season there have been two new productions: a grandly ceremonial staging of Mozart's Idomeneo by Director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, and a controversial setting of Macbeth by Sir Peter Hall. The Met cast Idomeneo as few houses can, with Pavarotti, Mezzo Frederica von Stade and Sopranos Hildegarde Behrens and lleana Cotrubas. All had voices big, agile and beautiful enough to handle the opera's extraordinary demands, and the result was a triumph...
...Macbeth, however, had problems. The production was vehemently booed on its opening night in November by a segment of the audience that found the sight of witches flying through the air on broomsticks risible, the presence of a nude dancer inappropriate and the arrival of white-clad ballerinas during Macbeth's dream sequence comical. Some prominent critics were outraged: Donal Henahan, in the New York Times, said Macbeth "may just be the worst new production ... in modern [Met] history." Hall's attempt to place the opera in a mid-19th century theatrical context was daring, but sometimes miscalculated...
...refuses to be pinned down about his favorite pieces of music. Says Levine: "There is a general tendency in the world to be preoccupied with evaluating things, and this is a trap. If you agree that Verdi's masterpieces are Otello and Falstaff, then what about Ernani and Macbeth? In finding a level on a kind of musical Richter scale, it implies that you should not be altogether involved with works that get only a 3 or a 5." Yet, with the fervor of the true specialist, he will happily expatiate on Beethoven's metronome markings or Debussy...