Macbeth's bass-baritone Greer Grimsley is a nice guy with a talent for playing tormented souls.

Opera star Greer Grimsley has made a name playing intense, tormented characters, and he certainly looks and sounds the part: imposingly tall, with long dark hair, he has a speaking voice as deep and resounding as the bass-baritone he sings with. But it’s his friendly demeanour, perhaps a holdover from his childhood in the genial Deep South, that is so disarming—and such a contrast to the gods, ghosts, and murderers he portrays.

He’s taken on a diverse array of characters around the world over the course of his career, but Grimsley is a favourite for his powerful Wagnerian roles, channelling the eerie title role of The Flying Dutchman and winning Seattle Opera’s Artist of the Year award last summer for his stint as the god Wotan in the Ring Cycle. Now, in Vancouver, he takes his first stab at a work that showcases the combined powers of two larger-than-life heavyweights: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth reimagined with operatic force by Giuseppe Verdi. Adding to the impact, this Macbeth will be staged with huge holographic projections by Kiss of the Spider Woman designer Jerome Sirlin in this Vancouver Opera coproduction (with Portland Opera and Edmonton Opera) during its run from Saturday (November 25) to ?December 2 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

“Sure, sometimes you say ”˜It’d be nice to play a comedy,’?” allows Grimsley with a smile, relaxing in a downtown café before rehearsals as Macbeth’s title character. Still, he couldn’t be more excited about the chance to tackle both a Bard character and a Verdi score. Of his role in Macbeth, he says: “It is intense, like it is with Wotan: what’s tiring is not the physicality or the singing. It’s being committed to the role and to the drama. And at the end of every evening, you’re mentally tired. There is an intensity when you’re playing Macbeth or Wotan, there is an energy you have to put across, and it is psychically draining.”

Adding to the demands on Grimsley while playing Macbeth are the character’s inner conflicts. The story, set in 10th-century Scotland, finds Lady Macbeth goading him into murdering the king in order to take power. In the bloody plot that follows, he descends into a world of murder and madness, constantly questioning his own actions and haunted by the prophecies of an entire chorus of witches (versus the three in Shakespeare’s version). “That’s opera: if you’re gonna have witches, you have a whole stageful,” Grimsley quips.

“It’s an amazing piece of drama and I feel really lucky to do it,” he enthuses. “The tricky part of this is musically. With theatre, you can show he’s conflicted over time. With this opera, within the same measure he’s saying one thing and then another. You’re hit with this constantly—he’s constantly changing directions.”

It says a lot about Grimsley that he always tries to find the human side of his characters, even when they carry out inhuman acts. “For me, Macbeth has a conscience. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be conflicted,” Grimsley explains. “He has that sort of nagging voice telling him killing on the battlefield is an honourable thing but killing your king isn’t honourable. He’ll get to a point where he feels okay with it, then a relapse. He hasn’t done anything that other kings haven’t done. That’s why I say this tale is a cautionary tale to humans. That was the joy of doing Wotan also—he made the bad decisions, he lied, he’s trying to make it better, trying to close Pandora’s box.”

You can see why Grimsley has become known as a “singing actor” rather than an old-style opera star who simply stands on-stage and belts out his tunes. He says the approach goes back to his roots: growing up in New Orleans, he got into drama well before he saw an opera. He actually aspired to be an archaeologist, but when someone at his high school showed him he had a voice well worth training, he ended up studying performance at Loyola University and later at the Juilliard School. Musical theatre seemed like the logical field to go into, but then he discovered that opera was an even better realm in which to fuse his two passions: dramatic acting and song.

Grimsley’s commitment to the drama of a work extends to the way he’s approaching this particular production’s spectacular holographic effects. He says the key for him will be concentrating on building the relationships in the opera, and never getting distracted from that. The projected, 3-D imagery will largely evoke the settings of Macbeth—battlefields, castles, caves—but sometimes, Grimsley reports, the colours will shift to reflect the emotions of the characters. He welcomes the cutting-edge look of the production: “Unfortunately, at this point, we [opera] are the last ones to take advantage of stage effects, and in the last century opera was a leader in stage effects.”

Building the work’s key relationship shouldn’t be too difficult for Grimsley, considering who’s playing Lady Macbeth. Celebrated soprano Jane Eaglen, making her Vancouver debut, is a close friend, and one he’s had many chances to form chemistry with on-stage, most recently at the Seattle Opera. (Grimsley, who lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, mezzo-soprano Luretta Bybee, and daughter Emma, calls the Emerald City his “artistic home”.)

Here in Vancouver, people are probably better acquainted with Shakespeare’s Macbeth than the opera of the same name, but Grimsley, ever an advocate for his art form, doesn’t hesitate when asked what Verdi’s version adds to the work. “We respond emotionally when we hear music; when we see a play, we may respond emotionally, but first it goes through a critical process in our brains,” he says. “With opera you have something that touches you in deeper emotions. Music is the conduit for the audience to the characters; it reaches audiences in a quicker way.”