New York's Metropolitan Opera has kicked off its new season with a high-stakes gamble: a brand-new production of Verdi's Macbeth, directed by a woman making her debut at the house on less than a year's notice. Louisa Proske, co-founder of the scrappy indie company Heartbeat Opera, got the call when the original director dropped out — a fraction of the usual two-plus years of planning these productions normally get. Her reaction, after general manager Peter Gelb asked if she could move very fast: she loves impossible challenges.
Proske's background made her an unexpected but logical pick. She started Heartbeat Opera in a yoga studio in 2014, building a reputation for bold, budget-conscious reinventions of the classics before leaving in 2018 for four seasons at Oper Halle in her native Germany. She also wrote her Cambridge thesis on Macbeth itself, so the source material was hardly new to her. She kept her trusted team: set designer Jon Bausor, costume designer Montana Levi Blanco and choreographer Jorrell Lawyer-Jefferson.
The staging leans into unease. Bausor's set conjures a modern war zone — a concrete wall with a hole blasted through it, rubble at the edges, scenes shifting on a revolving turntable — while Blanco's plush Renaissance-era costumes evoke Shakespeare's world of power and privilege. The witches, staged as a dancing contingent, become what Proske calls greedy voyeurs, creeping through the walls as the Macbeths descend. She frames the opera as a story about the slide into tyranny and the agony of living in times you no longer understand, which she considers a very current sentiment.
On stage, the cast is genuinely heavyweight. Baritone Quinn Kelsey sings Macbeth, with soprano Lise Davidsen as Lady Macbeth, tenor Freddie De Tommaso as Macduff and bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green as Banquo. Music director Yannick Nezet-Seguin conducts the orchestra and chorus.
For travellers, the timing is generous: the production runs for 10 performances from its Tuesday opening, and the Saturday matinee on Oct. 17 is being broadcast live to movie theatres worldwide — so even a trip that doesn't include Lincoln Center can catch it. If you are in New York this autumn, a Met night is one of the city's great value splurges, with rush and standing-room options regularly available. And there's a nice narrative bonus: the director walked to the Met from her old downtown startup in under 40 minutes, and the scrappy energy clearly came with her. Kelsey says she runs rehearsals without any drill-sergeant act but commands the room all the same — a promising sign for a season opener staged at speed.
Story via Daily Sabah Travel.
