Giuseppe Verdi, Francesco Maria Piave with additions Andrea Maffei | Macbeth / 2026 [The Metropolitan Opera’s HD-live production]

hitting the spot

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giuseppe Verdi (composer), Francesco Maria Piave with additions Andrea Maffei (libretto, based on the play by William Shakespeare) Macbeth / 2026, Gary Halvorsen (HD director), Louisa Proske (stage director) [The Metropolitan Opera’s HD-live production]

 

Yesterday, Saturday 17, 2026, Howard and I attended the highly acclaimed new Metropolitan Opera production of Macbeth.

    The last time we’d see a production was back in the 1970s at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The production in 1976, was by the famed Teatro alla Scala from Milan, with Claudio Abbado leading the La Scala Orchestra, with a quite remarkable cast with Piero Cappuccilli as Macbeth, Shirley Verret as Lady Macbeth, Nicolai Ghiaurov as Banquo, and Veriano Luchetti as MacDuff. We were young, and we were not wowed, both us now remembering only the witches waving rubber snakes in the air, not at all a memorable production for 29 and 30-year-old graduate students. You certainly might have though we would remember Shirley Verret!

     We still, after seeing yesterday’s performance, recognize that the opera—produced in 1847, before his first great successes such as Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata, and which was revised and expanded in a French version, premiering in Paris in 1865—with several set choral numbers of the displaced Scottish peasants whose husbands, wives, and children have been killed, later in the opera, by the now tyrant Macbeth, looking more like displaced Italian peasants during the Napoleonic Wars than anything out of Scotland.

     Although the witches of this production most certainly did not wave rubber snakes in the air, they were certainly not as austere and terrifying as one might have imagined. Dressed mostly in beige, they looked more, as the head choral singer of the group told host Anthony Roth Costanzo during the intermission backstage conversation, like they were actually having fun in providing Macbeth with truthful but misleading prognostications: he will not be killed by a man born of woman, and his rule shall not fall until the Birnam Forest itself rises up against him. He therefore believes, vaguely, that he is impregnable. The head witch admitted they were indeed having more fun in this opera than all the others. Perhaps a little more austere production might have made us more frightened of them. As it is, they hover over the major actors like ghouls ready to remind them of the awful forces that control their inner selves. The demons in this work are clearly within us.

      Having with their own hands killed King Duncan, the Macbeths have now become paranoid enough that they must destroy Banquo, his son Fleance (who after all is prophesized as becoming his successor), and seek other the deaths of many others.  

      Concerning other problems in the direction, I’m not sure that the complexity of the set, including a turntable set moved to show not only the rough highlands, but several of the Macbeth’s palace rooms, was absolutely necessary or even fully offered us new insights into their complex lives as they move from the killing fields into their bedrooms, unable to wash the blood completely off their hands. At moments the set seemed somewhat cumbersome.

     All these minor quibbles aside, however, this was an absolute joy of an opera to watch with some of the greatest vocal offerings I have experienced in a very long while. With glorious voices such as the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen as Lady Macbeth whose several major arias “Trionfai!” (“I have triumphed!”), the celebratory dinner song, “Si colmi il calice” ("Fill up the cup"), with elements reminding one of bel canto in it, and, of course, the truly great sleepwalking scene (“Una macchia è qui tuttora!”; "Yet here's a spot"), which Davidsen sings with such control that she can almost whisper her terrifying nightmares before truly revealing in full voice her and her husband’s horrific deeds before her lady servant and a male observer the servant has invited to witness the nightly spectacles.

     As opera critic Deryck Cook wrote in his essay of 1964, “Shakespeare into Music,” while again agreeing that Macbeth is not up to Verdi’s greater Shakespeare adaptations such as Otello or Falstaff observed:

 

“Only during the present Verdi craze could his Macbeth be seriously set beside its tremendous original. What can we make of a Macbeth who pursues his fatal vision through a musical desert of the old fustian recitative, or a Lady Macbeth whose prayer to be unsexed is a barn-storming martial cabaletta? In the "Grand scena di sonnambulismo."admittedly, Verdi did so magically stroke the big strumming guitar of his orchestra, and so chasten the vocal pride of Italian 'bel canto, as to foreshadow his achievements of some forty years later.”

      By this time Macbeth (Quinn Kelsy) himself is almost mad. But he is a man of guilt, we perceive, from the first moment he hears of the witches’ prophecies, arguing to himself that he must not interfere with fate, while ambition drives him to almost immediately commit the heinous crime from his early aria (“Mi si affaccia un pugnal?”; "Is this a dagger which I see before me?") to the beautiful and terrifying aria after he has seen the full implications of the witches’ predictions: (“O lieto augurio”; "O, happy augury! No wood has ever moved by magic power").

      His final great aria, in this production sung as he is dying, (“Cielo!”; "Heaven") admits that he knows no one will speak well of him after his death, and that he has ruined his life with ambition, hate, and fear is one of the most brilliantly performed works I have witnessed in my personal operatic history.

    But don’t leave Banquo out, who sings his one great aria (“Come dal ciel precipita”; "O, how the darkness falls from heaven") to his son Fleance as he suspects the journey they are making in escape is filled in danger. Baritone-bass opera singer Rayan Speedo Green sings this song with such a deep passion that he almost, at least for a few moments, upstages all the others. As he told Costanzo during the intermission conversation, “There is a lot of pressure on you since this in the only time in the opera when Banquo is permitted to wow the audience.” He most certainly does wow us with his great performance.

      A moment later, however, he perceives that he has been betrayed and insists his son flee as he, himself, is murdered.

      But in order to create such a wonderful production, one cannot ignore either the talents of Freddie De Tommaso as McDuff nor the truly great Metropolitan opera chorus, now directed by Tilman Michael. If you have ever wondered how to perform soldiers in battle, the wonderful action director Ran Arthur Braun has trained his dancers to perform acrobatic feats as they play out, almost in Japanese Kabuki style their war-time deeds.

      And, obviously, none of this would have made it across the stage lights without the truly great conducting of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who with beautiful painted fingernails brings his baton to one of the greatest orchestras in the world, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. The truly wonderful thing about these HD productions is how alive the sound is on the large, fully amplified theater screen, better than even in the massive hall of the theater itself. The music is utterly overwhelming, and if you love opera and the nuances of the score this is how to best hear it.

      The audience applauded wildly, demanding a significant number of reentries of their favorite performers and choral groups. In her hurry to join the final bows, director Louisa Proske even lost her shoe, grabbing it and holding it on high as if it were her trophy for the brilliant afternoon performance.

      This is what opera is all about.

    This work, about tyranny, betrayal, greed, and unchecked ambition, is something we need to see again now in our own time, if for other no reason but to remind us that it too will some day come to an end and order return.

 

Los Angeles, October 14, 2026

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (October 2026).

 

 

Chris Housman | Hidin’ Somethin’ / 2025 [music video]

a housewife’s revenge

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Housman (composer and performer), Ford Fairchild (director) Hidin’ Somethin’ / 2025 [4 minutes] [music video]

 

This recent music video by country-style gay composer and singer Chris Housman consists of a simple revenge story right out of Alfred Hitchcock’s famed TV series, although perhaps this is a bit more perverse than even the master of murder and mayhem might have imagined.

      In bed together after spending the night love-making are too heavily tatted men, Housman and Gable LaDuke, the later playing the lying husband of preacher’s daughter Brauwyn Spinner. Housman wonders where, suddenly his night-time lover is on his way to. LaDuke simply mumbles something about the fact he has to do something that day, even though supposedly it’s his day off from work. However, he accidently leaves behind his wallet, and Housman discovers, picture by picture, the real truth through a picture and a hidden wedding ring.

   We quickly discover where he’s headed as we observe his wife (Spinner) reading an old love letter from another man she’s discovered in a box. From there on the song takes over, recounting her love and sacrifices for the man that all this time has been ‘hidin’ not only ‘somethin’,’ but his entire identity as a bisexual, gay-oriented man who has betrayed his wife and family.

     She cooks up a special pot pie which quickly puts him in a hidden grave, dug by hand, making her another person is now is “hidin’ somethin’.”

      But the whole story told in the lyrics about how many years she has put up with his “beatings and the cheating that…put her through hell,” reveals her fury and supposedly justifies her culinary murder.

     The heavily inflected voice and instrumentation on the chorus which repeats “hidin’ somethin’” is a powerful reminder of what is truly at issue in this musical narrative, again directed by Housman’s usual partner, Ford Fairchild.

 

Grew up at the crossroads of a preacher's daughter and a farmer’s wife

She thought she found a one woman man to love her ‘til the day she dies

But 30 years in, done raising his kids, and keeping his front porch swept

She found a box full of letters, he shoulda been better at hiding those secrets he kept

He finally found one hole that he can’t get out

‘Cause she’s got a shovel and a whole lotta ground

She goes way out where the lord can’t see

She ain’t weeping under those willow trees now

He’s getting what he had coming

She’s serving that backwoods justice

By the time that the sun comes up

He won’t be the only one hidin’ somethin’

She could take the beatings and the cheating hell that he put her through

But everything hit different when she read ‘bout the other folks he left black and blue

So on Sunday night, made his chicken pot pie, and she threw a little something else in

By the time it got dark she was rolling up a tarp, his cold heart won’t be beating again

 

‘Cause he’s found one hole that he can’t get out

‘Cause she’s got a shovel and a whole lotta ground

She goes way out where the lord can’t see

She ain’t weeping under those willow trees now

He’s getting what he had coming

She’s serving that backwoods justice

By the time that the sun comes up

He won’t be the only one hidin’ somethin’

 

     Clearly Housman has no sympathy whatsoever for the millions of men whose gay sexuality is kept a secret from their wives, family, and, at moments, even themselves.

 

Los Angeles, July 24, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).

Hannah Gadsby | Nanette / 2018

 speaking up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hannah Gadsby (writer), Jon Olb and Madeleine Parry (directors) Nanette / 2018

 

As philosophers and others such as Henri Bergson have long argued, laughter—although seemingly giving us pleasure—is not always grounded in joy, but much like growling, is often a way we have of dealing with the tension between reality and what we would like to be the truth. As comedians well know—John Osbourne showed us this in his The Entertainer, just as Robin Williams demonstrated it in his suicide—comedians are not always happy folks, often using humor as a kind of armor, deflecting their own feelings of insignificance and fear to hide what they most feel inside.

      The wonderful Tasmanian-born stand-up comedian Hannah Gadsby explores this territory in her performance titled Nanette, which is filled with laughter but also with a great deal of anger, aimed particularly at self-privileged males.

      Born lesbian into a society that simply did not accept the idea of homosexuality, time and again, throughout her youth, she was awarded for her successful golf tournaments with dishware, while the male competitors were given money and other more solid awards. Her grandmother, she quips, kept telling her that “Mr. Right was just around the corner,” forcing her to be very warry about the corners in her life.

      Gadsby takes the opportunity of her stand-up show to help educate us about comedy and how it works. She argues that basically a comic line depends on a two-part structure, the short narrative which builds the tension and the release of that tension with a quick twist in the tale.

      Yet Gadsby’s performance, in this case, is basically written in three parts, the first of which—part of the build-up—reveals the problems of her childhood, those problems, as in most comedy conclude with quick zingers that shuffle those problems into another dimension, as we, seemingly with her, laugh them off.

      In the second part, this skilled dialogist, suddenly declares that she may be giving up comedy, as she explains the nature of a joke and how for all these years she used those quips to protect herself from having to actually face those childhood difficulties. Still, she allows some remarkable releases, allowing us to share some of her informative explanations of her craft in between bits of laughter.

      By the third part of her amazing “talk,” one that bears similarities to another comic-dialogist, Spaulding Gray (who also committed suicide, he by drowning), Gadsby switches gears, letting out the very anger which has allowed her to deflect the truth over and over again, and turning against the male aggressors in her life, whether passive simply in the male presumptions of priority or active in what appears to have sexual abuse (she insistently names no names and refuses to indicate what relationships these men might have had to her), but as she recently mentioned in an interview with The New York Times, this film-version of her piece was the very most difficult since her mother in the audience.

      What we have previously released in our growls of laughter now quickly turns to tears, particularly if you have any empathy, which even uncomfortable straight men in the audience should have developed by this time given the amazing talents she already revealed. Many critics have characterized this last section as going “beyond” comedy, of taking the genre into new territory. But I might suggest that she is simply returning to the first part, the narrative build-up, but projecting with an entirely different lens, of opening herself up to show us the real pain and suffering she endured for all those years. Instead of continuing to protect herself through the armor of laughter, she has permitted herself to talk to us straight-forwardly, to ask us to truly hear her pain and anger that she still retains for having to suffer in silence for so many years.

     As she insists: “You wrote the rules, and I read them!”

     I was startled, I admit, to hear her report that as a child she become silent, seemingly appearing to be shy and unsocial, when she obviously was a quick-witted, intelligent woman. Just the week before I had read an op-ed piece in The New York Times by Guy Branum, describing how, even as a young man, his obviously effeminate gay voice while growing in Sutter County, California—a place clearly not that very different from the Tasmanian island of Australia—altered his behavior, as he puts it:  

 

                   By the fourth grade, I learned that there was something about me that

                   made me audibly different from the other boys my age. I could not mask it,

                   I could not change it, I could not fight so well that I could earn the

                   respect of my classmates. My voice evoked rage and disgust from

                   my peers and teachers. I kept it hidden and tried to fit into a role that did not

                   fit me. I played football, I tried to date girls. None of it worked, so I

                   became quiet, very quiet, for a long time.

 

     And suddenly I recalled a piece I’d long ago written about my own childhood, something to the effect, after being terrified on the playground by the school-yard bully, that for years after I grew silent, turning in to read, write, and dream in private. I am sure that no-one who reads this today might ever believe it! When you're quiet for so many years, perhaps you feel you have to make up for it.

     I was, nonetheless, still a privileged male, and was never abused by a grown-up that I know of—except for my father’s almost hysterical view of homosexuality. And Gadsby is still very righteously angry at a time that I realize I led a rather fortunate gay life. We all adapt differently to the bigotry against lesbianism and gay life. Moreover, things have changed much, if not yet sufficiently.

     I think Gadsby’s moving performance ought to be perceived as both a Kaddish for all the lives of those in the LGBTQ community who have been traumatized by the dominant heterosexual world and, particularly during the AIDs crisis, even died for their sexual identities. Here, finally, we have a new conversation that needs to be heard and at least listened to by even those who may feel uncomfortable by its truth. Simply being quiet or laughing, for that matter, is no longer a solution.

 

Los Angeles, August 1, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2018).