Apparently booing was common in centuries past, but lately it's pretty rare at opera productions. Now it's been revived at the San Francisco Opera, not for the singers, who were marvelous, but for the production team of what the San Jose Mercury News called "one of the silliest, most incoherent productions seen...in years."
The central playing space - a big concrete cube where Macbeth and his wife light candles, make love and plan their murders - looks like a rent-by-the-month storage unit. There are military men in camouflage and guys who are dressed like sanitation workers.According to the Mercury News reviewer, the production team was "roundly booed."
Banquo's assassins take a break from their bloody task to dress up as women in black skirts and wigs. The three witches of Shakespeare's original are now a chorus of women wearing red.
One of them twirls a hula hoop. One blows bubbles. They all seem to enjoy dancing. Someone carries a green typewriter across the stage and places it in a prominent spot, for no apparent reason....
Why was [the doctor] blindfolded? The only ones who know for sure are [the designers]. Surely they had a good reason for burying a trio of ghosts under the tablecloth in the banquet scene, and "animating" them in the witches' cave moments later (yes, they sit up like extras in "Night of the Living Dead"). And then there's that hula hoop; its reason for being remains anybody's guess.
Photo: San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House
1 comment:
It is not at all uncommon for audiences in European opera houses to boo a stage director on opening night if they don't like the production. I've been in the house in Salzburg and in Munich where this has happened. I've also witnessed a tenor singing in Aida booed during his curtain call in Munich at the Bayerische Staatsoper. Maybe American audiences are too polite.
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