Macbeth

CANADIAN OPERA (2005)
DORA AWARD (Toronto) Nomination for Best Production of the Year

MACBETH by Giuseppe Verdi, based on the play by Shakespeare
Conductor: Richard Bradshaw
Cast: P. Hunka, G. Lukács, B. Bilgili, R. Honeywell
Production: F. Racine (assoc. director), D. Lyne (scenery/clothes), D. Finn (lighting)

“If you know Shakespeare’s Macbeth, you’ll be surprised by Verdi’s operatic handling of the story. But when it’s well staged–as it is by the Canadian Opera Company—there’s a visceral quality to this story of a Scottish lord and his wife who, tempted by evil, go over to the dark side and are themselves delivered to violence. Director Nicholas Muni offers a strong take on the material, his interpretation begins in a Scotland caught in a rigid social structure. Muni and his designers spend as much time on the details as on the broad strokes, creating smooth transitions between scenes.”
– Jon Kaplan, NOW Magazine

“COC’s new production is hip to the sexual politics, and smart enough to realize that you can’t dissect them fully onstage without doing some major damage to the work. The show enhances the thematic strengths while throwing out questions about what kind of fictional universe Verdi is asking us to inhabit. It was austere and arresting to see Nicholas Muni’s stage direction…a strong presentation of an opera that awkwardly straddles two periods of Verdi’s career.”
–Robert Everett-Green, Globe and Mail

“…a tortured, psychological, espressionistic, blood drenched version.”
–Paula Citron, Classical 96.3FM

“The Canadian Opera’s stunning new production, set in an indeterminate time frame, evolves from two groups of 12 gray leather-and-chrome love seats on either side of a long ramp inhabited at first by the chorus of witches. With surreal symbolism, the ramp tilts, is raised at both ends and does slow aerial gyrations as the tensions tighten. Stage director Nicholas Muni makes effective use of the space…”
–Herman Trotter, Buffalo News