Often produced at major theaters across the world, including Minneapolis’ Guthrie, “Macbeth” has a centuries-long reputation for being accursed, owing in part to the supposedly real incantations of the witches in the play. Shakespeare is reputed to have stepped in on opening night in 1606 to play Lady Macbeth because the actor depicting that role suddenly died.
In 1947, actor Harold Norman, who was playing the title character, was killed onstage at the Oldham theater in Manchester, England, during a battle scene after being stabbed with a real dagger.
And in 1988, when an 82-year-old man fell to his death from a top balcony at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House during the second intermission of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Macbeth,” the rest of the four-hour opera was canceled.
But the biggest and most tragic event around the play happened on May 10, 1849, in New York when some two dozen people were killed in the Astor Place Riot. The tragedy was triggered by competition between two virulently competitive actors playing Macbeth on the same night just blocks away from each other — American Edwin Forrest, who was starring at the Broadway Theater, and Englishman William Charles Macready, who was at the Astor Place Theatre.
A crowd of 10,000 gathered by the Astor Place Opera House and the militia was called out to quell the disturbance. Most of those killed were working-class theater lovers who died at the hands of authorities.
To counter the curse, theater professionals have developed a series of practices, including not uttering the name of the play inside a playhouse. Instead, they refer to “Macbeth” as “The Scottish Play.” And if someone does say the name by mistake, there’s a ritual that involves leaving the building, turning around and spitting.