What to wear? What to wear? With a November high temp in the eighties, my dress-up grown-up wardrobe is challenged for the Dallas Opera matinee tomorrow. And now Scott Cantrell's review of "Macbeth" in today's Dallas Morning News suggests that attire for a hayrack ride and haunted house might be more appropriate.
Heard the DO's technical director, Drew Field, speak last Saturday about the upcoming production of "Salome". At the end of his talk he announced he was heading off to mix up thirty-five gallons'o'blood for "Macbeth". On the tour of the costume shop we spotted the box marked "Lohengrin Cone-heads", which brought to mind one of the low points of last season. Thank heaven each season is filled with so many highs! Each design effort gives me great fuel to ponder, and fabulous memories. It's fun to play the How Would I Have Done It Differently game.
From the word master, Mr. Cantrell:
Then there's the matter of the production, from Seattle Opera. ..Designer Robert Israel's set is a sterile institutional interior, with bluish panels and roll-up garage doors. Scrims come and go. Piles of big stones appear here and there. When Lady Macbeth laments her blood-stained hands, what's supposed to be blood oozes from the walls; alas, it looks more like streaks of printer's ink. Marie Barrett's lighting is unsubtle. ...The witches are done up half as veiled brides in white, half as veiled mourners in black. That, according to stage director Bernard Uzan, is to represent life as all about beginnings and endings. (Wouldn't have guessed that, would you?) That, too, is supposed to be the "message" of the stones: things being built and torn down. An apelike skeleton stenciled on a wall is similarly supposed to represent development. It, dear reader, has come to this.
Now if I just knew what to wear.
© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder
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