Macbeth

The year isn't half over, but it's already a banner one for the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival. In January, the small professional theater company received an anonymous $1 million donation. Last month, on Shakespeare's birthday, it chalked up its first National Endowment for the Arts grant. The $25,000 matching grant from the NEA's Shakespeare for a New Generation Program put the Baltimore festival in good company. Among the 34 other theaters honored with this round of grants were the Tony Award-winning Oregon and Utah Shakespeare festivals as well as Washington's Shakespeare Theatre Company.

`RENT' IS DUE The lowdown -- Rent, the late Jonathan Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning musical adaptation of La Boheme, returns to the Lyric Opera House tomorrow for five performances. Modeled after the practice in New York -- where Rent is the seventh longest-running show in Broadway history -- seats in the first two rows are available for $20 each. These tickets must be purchased at the box office, two hours before curtain time on the day of the performance, for cash, and are limited to two tickets per person.

Helen Mirren has such a strong physical presence that it's hard to isolate her voice from the rest of her acting. The unconventionality of her jutting nose makes her gorgeously proud, and her alert face even more beautiful; her body is all business, whatever the business at hand. Yet when you hear her voice on the phone from Los Angeles, her personality comes across in every sound she makes, from the zesty, womanly curiosity of her "Oh, really?" or "That's very interesting" to the declarative romance of "I love that."

The State Highway Administration is moving forward with a long-awaited Route 32 reconstruction project in Eldersburg to ease congestion and curb accidents. The $8.5 million, half-mile project, from south of Macbeth Way to Route 26 (Liberty Road), should go out to bid in November, with construction to begin next summer. State engineers met with the Carroll County commissioners and held an information session in Sykesville last week to explain design changes for the project, which includes $2.5 million in county funds.

In her fourth year leading the Naval Academy's Masqueraders theater troupe, Christy Stanlake again is offering extraordinary theatrical fare with Hannah Cowley's 18th-century romantic comedy, The Belle's Stratagem, opening tonight in the academy's Mahan Hall. Stanlake, 33, has established a reputation for her exceptional theatrical choices of works not often done. In her first year with the Masqueraders, Stanlake brought George Bernard Shaw's St. Joan to the overwhelmingly male academy because, she said, she wanted "to get students thinking of theater as reflective of their lives, with a military leader connected to her troops leading in battle but serving her people."

Brush up on your Shakespeare. When it comes to an intimate knowledge of bullying bosses, weasely co-workers and corporate skullduggery, the Donald can't hold a laser pointer to the Bard. It's true that Shakespeare's comedies, romances and tragedies are about other things, as well - lovers and fairies, murder and war - but the theme of power in all of its corrupting allure is at least an undercurrent in most of the playwright's works. And, of course, power is the main theme - perhaps the only theme - of NBC's The Apprentice.

If she sought the ultimate challenge for her third U.S. Naval Academy production, Masqueraders drama troupe director Christy Stanlake might have found it in Shakespeare's Macbeth. The chilling tale of ambition proved well within the grasp of Stanlake and her players in performances over the past two weekends at Mahan Hall. It could also have moved them closer to Stanlake's goal of making the Navy theater an exciting, well-known program "off the yard." Stanlake brought an innovative, nontraditional production of Macbeth to the stage with the help of set and costume designer Richard Montgomery, a theatrical designer who has nearly 300 credits with such companies as Royal Court Theatre, Old Vic and American Repertory Theatre.

The county commissioners are considering shifting about $4 million from local road projects in South Carroll to pay the initial cost of several highway improvements in the area, hoping their contribution could help persuade the state to complete the projects. "The state has said that if we put up money, we will get these roads," Commissioner Julia Walsh Gouge said yesterday. "They are more than willing to work with us." The board would switch its focus from local roads to planning and engineering for the Route 26 and Route 32 corridors and the intersection of the two highways.

Shakespeare's Macbeth is a play whose title character concocts and carries out his most heinous deeds in the dark. So it's especially fitting that shadows figure prominently in the new production at Washington's Shakespeare Theatre. In director Michael Kahn's eerie vision - augmented by designer Michael Chybowski's spectral lighting - the prophesying witches first appear in shadow behind a scrim of bare trees. Later, when Macbeth revisits the witches for further soothsaying, their predictions take the form of shadows.

South Carroll residents are criticizing as unsafe and impractical a 25-year-old plan to use "connector" roads to ease traffic congestion in the county's most heavily populated area. The proposed roads, which would run parallel to Routes 26 or 32, Eldersburg's major arteries, could increase traffic in their neighborhoods, draw commercial vehicles onto residential streets and threaten the safety of children, residents said. The Freedom Area Citizens' Council has organized a discussion with the county commissioners and their planning staff on the issue of connector roads tomorrow night in Eldersburg.