The Met’s Macbeth Is a Bubbling Cauldron of Operatic Fun

I wonder if the nimble and inventive director Louisa Proske really meant for her new production of Verdi’s Macbeth, which opened the Metropolitan Opera season on Tuesday night, to be quite as much fun as it is. In a program note, she describes herself as a 13-year-old theater kid, obsessively muttering Shakespeare’s “mysterious, hallucinatory language.” Three decades later, she’s still glorying in the “terrifying” story of bloody fetuses, bloody corpses, and mass murderers “tormented and fractured by their own crimes.” Maybe somewhere along the way, in this hectic past year of preparation, her conception passed through a chilling and bitter psychodrama phase, but what has materialized onstage is something more truly operatic: a gloriously ghoulish, lyrically powerful, and sporadically campy entertainment.

Verdi multiplied Shakespeare’s three weird sisters into a whole coven, and Proske has them grinning, writhing, and spying in every corner, making efficient use of the Met’s huge stage. I start with them not just because the composer believed they were the third principal character, on a par with the Macbeth spouses, but also because they open the opera. “What have you done?” they sing in gleeful horror as the slithering orchestra makes it clear that the answer is not good. And those three syllables are all it takes to prophesy that the Met Opera Chorus — whether as witches, soldiers, courtiers, or downtrodden refugees — will deliver a performance of exhilarating ferocity and finesse. This is Tilman Michael’s third season as the Met’s chorus director, and he has his corps hitting those plosives and opening ahs in perfect sync, even as its singers swarm and mill. But it’s the stylistic command and expressive range, from celebration to exhaustion to vengeful fury, that earn the chorus top billing.

It’s also the engine of Proske’s complicated but effective direction, which expands outward from the claustrophobic grip of the thane and thaness’s monomania into a teeming spectacle. A trio of male dancers (who must come from the Russian part of Scotland) leaps and twirls atop a long table; armies clash in acrobatic swordplay, making literal sparks fly; and the crowd of sorceresses pantomimes a ghastly coronation. 

The one bit of apocalyptic grimness that does come through is the color scheme. Jon Bausor’s rotating cylindrical set could be read as a ruined concrete silo or a blasted stone castle keep; either way, it’s a relic of large-scale destruction, and so is the populace that Montana Levi Blanco has dressed in rodent-colored rags. The palette’s not just shades of rat — there’s blood, of course, in lively spatters, spreading splotches, and stained hands. Most of all, there’s Verdi’s score, with its mauve harmonies and Champagne sparkle. Yannick Nézet-Séguin nudges the orchestra’s warmth and saturation into territory that, if not quite gaudy, is certainly gala-worthy, privileging vibrancy over darkness. In the Met’s Macbeth, tragedy and evil are always in scare quotes.

And then we have the polychrome vocal wonders of Lise Davidsen and Quinn Kelsey as the demented social climbers stabbing their way to the top and dragging their self-loathing along with them. Davidsen bucks up her balky husband with a bloodthirsty holler, stiffens her voice against doubt, and, in her final sleepwalking scene, taps into the tender stratum of Lady Macbeth’s subconscious. A superb singer of Wagner’s and Strauss’s long dramatic lines, Davidsen hasn’t yet internalized the rhythmic bounce of Verdi’s style; the drinking song with which she tries to inject some festive atmosphere into the Banquo-haunted banquet lacks the manic jollity that would give the scene more thrust. But that’s a minor trade-off to hear a great soprano dive into a great dramatic role. 

While Macbeth is constantly crawling out of his skin, Kelsey sings the role with a relaxed confidence that is a pleasure to listen to, if dramatically disorienting. Energized by bravado or remorse, by Macbeth’s terror of his wife, ghosts, or fate, the warm mahogany grain of Kelsey’s baritone remains unchanged. For that reason, the two halves of the throat-slitting couple don’t project the feeling that they have barricaded themselves into a shared delusion. The inhabitants of the outside world also draw the audience’s appreciative interruptions: Tenor Freddie De Tommaso makes a brassy, triumphant Macduff, baritone Ryan Speedo Green an elegantly paternal Banquo. 

Proske began her professional career a dozen years ago, teaming with Ethan Heard to co-found Heartbeat Opera, a mini-company based in New York that compresses grand operas into small spaces without sacrificing energy or imagination. She has since moved on to full-size stages, mostly in Europe, but the leap to the Met can be daunting for anyone, and she handles it with aplomb. She seems to have wanted to set off a psychologically intense core — two complicated people twisted together in lethal obsession — with a frame of epic stagecraft. Their relationship plays out in a blank-walled castle bedroom as cozy as a prison yard and a hall of black mirrors with witches peering around the moving walls. But the gala audience that showed up on opening night in Halloween mode (kilts, masks, bloodstained white suits, regal gowns) must have picked up on the production’s ultimate mixture of playfulness and horror. It’s a gothic formula that may not offer the Shakespearean depths Verdi hoped to plumb but should keep the Met and its crowd happy for a good long spell.

Macbeth is at the Metropolitan Opera through October 20.