Carmen Balas

I was not able to write a review of this show in a timely fashion. There were many details I took issue with, but too much time has gone by, and I didn’t write them down. Probably the biggest mistake the author made was to try and make a modern opera using directly quoted Elizabethan English. This was a musicalized Macbeth: if ever a work deserved to be adapted into an opera, it’s this one, and all credit to the composer for daring to follow in Verdi’s footsteps. But if it’s ever going to be more than a personal challenge, though, and you want it to become an artistic success, let alone a commercial one, you need to update it for modern audiences. Shakespeare is hard enough all by itself for modern readers to understand. It gets a little better when his works are viewed on stage, but the language is so archaic that comprehension relies heavily on the stagecraft of the actors, the choices made by the director, and the quality of the performance, which can vary wildly from day to day.

To then present such a work in a concert setting, without costumes, drops, scene changes, staging, etc. is dead boring. I couldn’t understand what was going on. I tried sitting there and just enjoying the musical composition, and the excellent musicianship of New Era Group, but it just wasn’t enough to arrest my attention, and overcome our modern short attention span. I left early.

The composer should analyze Shakespeare’s play, have a living writer create a new script that tells the story of Macbeth in 21st Century English, and proceed from there, if he’s really intent on creating a new Macbeth opera.