“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”
The witches’ most famous line in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” sounds almost like a nursery rhyme. Its simplicity makes it easy to overlook what it means. Everything in Macbeth’s world is unstable. Good and evil trade places. Beauty conceals violence. Noble intentions rot from within.
Louisa Proske makes that contradiction the foundation of her Metropolitan Opera debut, a new production of Verdi’s “Macbeth” that opened the company’s season on Tuesday.
With Quinn Kelsey as Macbeth and Lise Davidsen as Lady Macbeth, the production has two formidable leads. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts with an appetite for Verdi’s most explosive dramatic moments.
Proske places the opera in a post-apocalyptic landscape. Montana Levi Blanco’s costumes borrow from Tudor and Elizabethan silhouettes, while Jon Bausor’s sets surround the characters with ruined concrete, damaged interiors and the remains of a society that appears to have already collapsed.
Fog hangs over the stage. The witches crawl across piles of rubble dressed like grotesque survivors from another century. As the stage rotates, they watch the action from corners and doorways, almost like spectators enjoying the destruction they have helped create.
Adam Silverman’s lighting adds another layer. The singers repeatedly cast long shadows across the stage, turning their silhouettes into visual reminders of the violence gathering inside them.
Kelsey gives the production its emotional centre.
His Macbeth is not introduced as a monster. He appears thoughtful, dignified and almost philosophical. When he first encounters the witches and reflects on a day that feels both foul and fair, Kelsey sings with a noble roundness and remarkable control.
His voice has warmth, weight and flexibility. More importantly, it changes as Macbeth changes.
That gradual transformation is one of the strongest aspects of Kelsey’s performance.
“Macbeth” has a relatively straightforward tragic structure. A soldier hears a prophecy, begins to believe in his own destiny, commits murder and then descends into paranoia and isolation. The danger is that Macbeth can become a one-dimensional villain.
Kelsey avoids that trap.
In the dagger scene, a darker edge enters his voice. After Duncan’s murder, panic and guilt break through the surface of his controlled singing. Later, the voice becomes increasingly empty.
By the time he reaches “Pietà, rispetto, amore,” Macbeth has almost nothing left except regret. He is not asking for forgiveness so much as confronting what he has become.
The Met also restores “Mal per me,” an aria Verdi removed when he revised the opera. It gives Kelsey another opportunity to expose Macbeth’s regret and his recognition of his own failure.
Kelsey’s vocal approach suits the character. His singing is not always the perfectly polished legato associated with traditional Verdi baritones. He uses straight tone, vibrato, huskiness and sudden flashes of brightness. The result feels responsive to Macbeth’s state of mind rather than fixed in one beautiful sound.
That sense of instability runs through Proske’s staging.
Even the fight choreography by Ran Arthur Braun contributes to the production’s strange atmosphere. Violent movements suddenly become balletic. Sword clashes produce bursts of light. Attacks seem to suspend themselves between realism and theatrical fantasy.
The Met has also restored part of the ballet music often removed from the opera. Jorrell Lawyer-Jefferson choreographs a grotesquely playful recreation of Duncan’s murder while Nézet-Séguin keeps the orchestra moving with elegant precision.
The conductor brings out the conflicting forces inside Verdi’s score. The strings can suddenly become lush and seductive before the brass overwhelms them. The overture uses pointed woodwinds and a dark, unusually subdued harp.
Nézet-Séguin also pays attention to details that might easily disappear inside the larger drama. In Banquo’s aria, for instance, he allows the violin melody to rise clearly while pushing the accompanying figures into the background, giving the music greater depth.
Lise Davidsen entered the production with enormous expectations.
She has established herself as one of the leading dramatic sopranos of her generation, particularly in German repertoire. Lady Macbeth demands something different. Verdi gives the character music that tests almost every part of the soprano’s technique, including difficult coloratura and extreme shifts across the vocal range.
Davidsen approaches the role with caution rather than brute force.
Her voice remains impressive, especially at the top, where it expands with striking power. Some of the more demanding coloratura passages lack the reckless abandon associated with the role, but her control and musical discipline remain evident.
Her strongest moment arrives in the sleepwalking scene.
Lady Macbeth walks through a distorted world of mirrors, confronting the consequences of what she has done. The room itself has changed. The luxurious bedroom seen earlier has become a scorched ruin.
Davidsen does not play the scene as theatrical hysteria. She sings with sorrow and restraint.
As her voice rises, it seems to escape the ruined room around her. Her carefully controlled decrescendo reveals something Macbeth never fully reaches: remorse without self-pity.
She ends the journey with a luminous high D-flat before Lady Macbeth disappears from the stage.
Kelsey’s Macbeth also gives the supporting characters greater dramatic purpose.
Ryan Speedo Green sings Banquo with a firm, controlled sound. Banquo is decent and principled, but deliberately ordinary. The witches have no reason to manipulate him in the same way they manipulate Macbeth.
Freddie De Tommaso gives Macduff a different kind of energy. His tenor has bite and Italianate warmth, with ringing high notes and small vocal details that bring genuine emotion into the character.
Macduff matters because he still feels alive.
By the time he enters the final stretch of the drama, so many characters have become consumed by ambition, fear or guilt that his grief provides a human counterweight.
One of the production’s smartest moments comes when Macduff appears among a group of refugees immediately after their mournful performance of “Patria oppressa.”
The chorus has been largely anonymous until then. Suddenly, their suffering becomes personal.
They are the people left behind by Macbeth’s ambition.
And for a few minutes, the opera stops being about a king, a prophecy or a supernatural curse. It becomes about the people forced to live with the consequences of someone else’s hunger for power.
