Review: A fine, spooky ‘Macbeth’ at Lyric Opera fights deliciously with our current recovery narrative
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Emotions ran high at the Lyric Opera Friday night. Thumping the words “together again,” the general director Anthony Freud was greeted by cheers as he heralded a return to the (newly refurbished) Civic Opera House after 18 months away. The board chair, Sylvia Neil, jumped up and down on the stage as she thanked the artists who’d persisted in their crafts during the pandemic. And the ebullient new musical director Enrique Mazzola waved at an audience that set aside decorum to shout “thank you, Enrique,” and conducted the traditional playing of the national anthem as if his contract were contingent on its exuberant execution.
Thereafter the curtain rose on Giuseppe Verdi’s “Macbeth,” an opera based on Shakespeare’s most perplexing tragedy and wherein the title character, after a few ghostly intrusions that don’t prevent him from bloodily offing anyone in his ambitious way, sings that life is full of sound and fury.
Signifying nothing.
That disconnect between the fashionable recovery rhetoric of the performing arts — the communal affirmation of hope and life — and the Shakespearean cynicism that Verdi so enthusiastically embraced in musical theme and form hung in the air Friday. Rather deliciously.
Here you had a night positioned as a night of healing togetherness, followed by an entertainment that astutely observes the heavens generally prefer to unleash toil and trouble, given how we’re all timelessly wedded to ambition, insecurity and jealousy.
I spent most of the evening wondering who was right, preferring the former, fearing the latter. Reason enough to attend. Great art is supposed to prick ballooning warmth.
I suspect I was not alone in marveling at the contrast. It was striking that the moment that landed with the most force Friday was perhaps the opera’s least characteristic aria, Macduff’s “Ah, la paterna mano.” That had a lot to do with the wrenchingly immersive passion of the singer, the fine American tenor Joshua Guerrero, but surely was also a consequence of the familiarity of the simple, human sentiments in the aria, which mourns the loss of the children and explicates the feelings of anyone who has been bereaved: Was there more I could have done?
Guerrero was fortunate there but he still deserves his acclaim. It is a stunner of a performance and, frankly, the true connective tissue of those two warring factions of the night.
Craig Colclough, who plays the title role, is not so fortunate with his timing. The general scholarly view of this opera, which is presented here with every note of the revised 1865 version, aside from the ballet music, is that Verdi failed to musically translate Macbeth’s tragic trajectory; specifically, how compounding ambition corrodes his prior nobility. True, perhaps. But any veteran of a bushel of takes on the Scottish play knows that the source is similarly confounding in this regard. Banquo is a moral rock and he is sung as such here by Christian Van Horn. But the active/reactive dichotomy is the curse of anyone playing the Thane of Cawdor, incohesive at his core.
Colclough sings the role more with amalgam of power and confusion than accessible vulnerability, which is a legitimate interpretation of what is happening to the man. And to Colclough’s great credit, not only does he expand Verdi’s intentional compositional contrasts between the relative cohesion of the orchestra and the palpable strains of the unhinged singer, but, at the very end, you feel Macbeth’s broken heart, assuming he had one. He is directed here as a man buffeted by powers too nightmarish for any human to withstand.
And creepy powers they be. Employing unimpeachable Scottish bona fides, the team of the director David McVicar and the set designer John Macfarlane set the entire production within the structure of what looks like a remote Scottish Kirk in Nairnshire; David Finn’s lights suggest the heavens are unstable and in mind of producing storms or, elsewhere in the firmament, perhaps hurricanes from warring wind and seas.
The subtextual implication is that all of this bloody butchery among the Scottish political leadership comes from psychological damage wrought by Presbyterian puritanism; the production puts you in mind of what Ivo Van Hove did on Broadway with Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” The chorus of witches are part church ladies and part embodiments of dangerous Scottish dogma, and, interestingly, when Malcolm, costumed in redcoat by the shrewd Moritz Junge, shows up with the expedient English, you intuit that Macfarlane is making the nationalist point that Scotland brought some forced historical subservience on itself.
It’s a clever, moralist ending, matched by the constant presence of spooky kids who look partly like refugees from the Addams Family and partly likely those avatars of want who hide under a ghost’s cloak in “A Christmas Carol.” If you can forgive a few clunks, and a long set change needlessly occasioned by the provision of folding tables, it all is of an invigorating piece.
Which brings us, finally, to Lady M. delightfully encapsulated by Sondra Radvanovsky, who vocally embraces all her ladyship’s contradictions. Spots or no, Lady M. was neither written nor composed to be of this world, and both Macfarlane and Mazzola rightly set Radvanovsky free to explore just what it means to sleep-sing staccato, fighting off not just her own dreamscape but the demons that come from figuring out what men do for power, long before anyone else.
Life is a zero sum game for Lady Macbeth. Weird that she is part of a recovery, I suppose. But perversely comforting, too.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “Macbeth”
When: Through Oct. 9
Where: Lyric Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Drive
Running time: 3 hours
Tickets: $39 to $319 at 312-827-5600 and lyricopera.org
