It’s all in what a title doesn’t say

THE solo musical comedy starring Amanda McBroom that opens off-Broadway tonight was called “Lady Macbeth Sings the Blues” when it premiered in June at Ventura’s Rubicon Theatre.

Now it’s “A Woman of Will.”

A venerable superstition has struck again -- that it’s bad luck for theater artists to utter the name “Macbeth.”

The same superstition is part of the premise of Lee Blessing’s “The Scottish Play,” a comedy about an ill-fated “Macbeth” production now at La Jolla Playhouse.

But to those who advised McBroom and co-writer Joel Silberman about the transfer of her show to New York, it was no fictional gag. “People are afraid of the word,” she says. “The arcana is intense.”

That wasn’t the only reason for the title change, however. McBroom says she was also told that “Sings the Blues” made the show sound too much like a cabaret act, when in fact it’s a narrative about a woman named Kate, a stressed-out songwriter who’s working on a musical adaptation of “The Merchant of Venice.” Kate finds herself confronting her problems through the perspectives of Shakespeare’s female characters, including Lady Macbeth.

McBroom adds that the further consensus of those advising her was that the suburban musical theater audience is “afraid of Shakespeare.” Presumably, theatergoers won’t realize that the “Will” in the new title refers in part to Shakespeare until after they’ve seen the show.

“A Woman of Will” is the first Ventura County production to move to New York, according to Elena Brokaw, the city of Ventura’s community services director. And McBroom, who lives in Ojai, also reports that many in the New York preview audiences didn’t pick up on some of the show’s jokes as fast as Ventura audiences did.