Macbeth

The 100th anniversary of Verdi's death on Jan. 27 is ready cause for most opera companies to perform, this season, at least one of the great Italian composer's more than two dozen operas. On the West Coast, Los Angeles Opera began its season with "Aida," San Diego Opera ends its season with "Aida" and San Francisco will have a June Verdi festival, with, as its centerpiece, "Aida.".

Shakespeare's "Macbeth," Verdi wrote to his librettist, is "one of the greatest creations of mankind!" "If we can't make something great with it, let's try at least to make something out of the ordinary." But they did make something great. At the Venice premiere in 1847, Verdi had to take 38 curtain calls. Nevertheless, for the Paris premiere, which took place 18 years later, a musically more mature Verdi decided to revise the work to reflect his then-current style.

Because of a throat infection, Audrey Stottler, on the advice of her doctor, has withdrawn from singing Verdi's Lady Macbeth for Opera Pacific Jan. 16-21 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. Rebecca Copley will step in. Cynthia Lawrence, who was already announced to alternate with Stottler in the role, is now scheduled to sing Jan. 16, 18 and 20. Copley will sing Jan. 19 and 21. Information: (714) 546-6000.

"Macbeth," that grimmest of Shakespearean tragedies, as a slapstick comedy? Well, sure. In fact, what playwright Richard Nathan does in "Scots on the Rocks," at the Chandler Studio, isn't exactly new. In the '60s, Archibald Macleish transformed what actors always superstitiously refer to as "The Scottish Tragedy" into his spoof "Macbird."

Pacific Symphony music director Carl St.Clair will make his Opera Pacific debut conducting Mozart's "The Magic Flute" from Nov. 7-12 to kick off the Irvine-based company's four-opera season at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. The company will present three other operas--including its first performances of Verdi's "Macbeth" and Strauss' "Der Rosenkavlier"--to complete its 2000-01 season.

Launching its third season of free outdoor productions, the Kingsmen Shakespeare Festival's impressive staging of "Macbeth" maintains the company's commitment to thorough professionalism in the remote confines of the California Lutheran campus. A fine cast and high production values forcefully render Shakespeare's most sinister tragedy in all its creepy splendor, without recourse to gimmicky conceits or exotic resettings.

Seminole County commissioners in Florida did not mind that a local nightclub was serving up eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog. What they did object to was the fact that the three witches in the club's version of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" were played by naked dancers.

Taking "Macbeth's" theme of upwardly mobile sociopaths to heart, form mirrors content in Suzanne Cryer's intriguingly appropriate staging of the Shakespeare classic at the Matrix Theatre. Ditching the atmospheric moodiness that typically attends the play, Cryer smothers emotional expression with flat delivery pierced by occasional eruptions of heightened intensity.

Reduced to its barest bones, Shakespeare's "Macbeth" is really a barn-burning melodrama, a pre-Gothic horror tale with dark corners, dripping blood and raw emotions. It's also one of those classic dramas that lend themselves to inventive staging. That's what has happened in a visually interesting revival of the classic play at the Waltmar Theatre at Chapman University in Orange.

On a recent afternoon, in a borrowed rehearsal space at the Village at Ed Gould Plaza in Hollywood, cast members from the latest production from Shakespeare Festival/LA waved arms and bare tree branches, toiling and troubling their way through that popular Shakespeare scene that is part weird magic, part cooking show: the witches stirring the caldron in "Macbeth." Just add eye of newt, tongue of frog and bring to a boil; serves three.