Macshush!

Whatever the curse's origins, there is no disagreement in the theater world about the play's treacherous history. A quick survey:

· When "Macbeth" opened in 1606, a boy named Hal Berridge, who was playing Lady Macbeth, died of a fever. Shakespeare himself replaced the lad.

· In 1849, two productions of "Macbeth" were staged simultaneously in New York, and the leads -- one an American, the other British -- were feuding. A crowd of thousands showed up at the Astor Place Opera House to pelt and protest the appearance of the latter, a famous Shakespearean actor named William Charles Macready. (This is back when people took theater very seriously.) When the protest became a riot, the authorities fired into the crowd, killing more than 20 people.

· In April 1865, Abraham Lincoln took a copy of "Macbeth" on a cruise down the Potomac. A few days later, he was assassinated.

· Three cast members died during a 1942 production of the play, starring John Gielgud, and a costume person committed suicide.

· The ghost of British actor Harold Norman turns up every Thursday at the Coliseum Theatre in Oldham, the same day he was accidentally stabbed in a swordfight during a performance of the play in 1947. He was rushed to the hospital and later died of peritonitis.

· Charlton Heston was burned on the groin on the opening night of a "Macbeth" he did in Bermuda in 1953. During the burning-castle scene, his tights were inadvertently soaked in kerosene and caught fire.

· A Broadway production starring Christopher Plummer churned through cast and crew: a handful of Macduffs, several directors, a few stage managers, light designers and so on. A couple dozen people caught the flu. Plummer pulled a ligament and broke a tooth.

You need more?

"I had a really close friend who was directing the play in St. Paul," says MacIntosh. "And on opening night, his leading actor had a heart attack. Nobody knew it was happening, except for Charles, who ran up onstage and held the actor in his arms, and the actor died in his arms."

While some of the examples above are surely false -- the events of 1606, for instance -- others really happened. (The man playing Macbeth in St. Paul did die onstage on opening night, at age 32.) The rest fall into the broad and glorious journalistic category known as "too good to check."

Macspit

"Look, Latinos are very superstitious, Jews are very superstitious, and theater people are very superstitious," says Moises Kaufman, director of the Public Theater's "Macbeth." "And I am all three, okay? So I am a very, very, very superstitious person."