If ever there was a classical smackdown, it is the one currently going on in New York. The City that Never Sleeps has always been the focal point of the country’s theatrical activity. Now, it is playing host to the biggest fight in town: Macbeth versus Macbeth. While Patrick Stewart is asking Broadway audiences eight times a week if there’s a dagger before him, nearby Verdi’s opera based on the very same play is also dazzling audiences. A New York Times piece on both productions pitted the two against each other and suggested a possible draw, if not a win in favor of the opera.

In discussing the ups and downs of the two Macbeths, the writer also made comparisons between Verdi’s other Shakespearean operas and the original source material. For this writer, the operas sometimes are move evocative than the plays upon which they are based. The argument put forth is that music is more visceral than words and can evoke a clearer response from an audience far more quickly. The writer admits that Shakespeare purists would balk at such a notion and compromises by saying that the two productions can coexist quite nicely because they are both so strong (in different ways).

Is that true? Are the majority of Shakespeare aficionados actually Bard Snobs? I’ve recently complained about an updated version of a classic play that includes jokes about contemporary pop stars. Am I putting Shakespeare before all else? It’s possibly that artists, critics and theatergoers like to be contrary, and this particular columnist is no different. In order to make the daring statement that Shakespeare isn’t all that and a bag of chips (yes, I know that catchphrase has expired, but I haven’t found anything to take its place), he has to assume that Will’s fans are stodgy, old, and clinging to dusty leatherbound copies of his plays as if they were sacred texts. Maybe in order to make the two Macbeths sound like a battle, you have to spin it like everything else.

Posted Thu, 08 May 2008 23:06:02 and filed under Opera, Macbeth, Theatre. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.