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 Character 7: Play: Threepenny Opera Author: Bertolt Brecht, translated by Ralph Manheim and John Willett Web Links: Peacham Synopsis The Threepenny Opera proclaims itself "an opera for beggars," and it was in fact an attempt both to satirize traditional opera and operetta and to create a new kind of musical theater based on the theories of two young German artists, composer Kurt Weill and poet-­‐playwright Bert Brecht. The show opens with a mock-­‐Baroque overture, a nod to Threepenny's source, The Beggar's Opera, a brilliantly successful parody of Handel's operas written by John Gay in 1728. In a brief prologue following the overture, a shabby figure comes onstage with a barrel organ and launches into a song chronicling the crimes of the notorious bandit and womanizer Macheath, "Mack the Knife." The setting is a fair in Soho (London), just before Queen Victoria's coronation. Act I Act I begins in the shop of Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, who runs a rather unusual business-­‐
he is the boss of London's beggars. He equips and trains them in return for a cut of whatever they can beg. In the first scene, he enrolls a new beggar with the help of his wife. After finishing with the new man, they notice that their grown daughter Polly did not come home the previous night. The scene shifts to an empty stable where Macheath himself is about to marry Polly, as soon as his gang has stolen and brought all the necessary food and furnishings. No vows are exchanged, but Polly is satisfied, and everyone sits down to a banquet. Since none of the gang members can provide fitting entertainment, Polly gets up and tosses off "Pirate Jenny," showing a surprisingly tough side of herself. The gang gets nervous when Chief of Police Tiger Brown arrives, but it's all part of the act; Brown had served with Mack in 1 England's colonial wars and has prevented Mack from being arrested all these years. The old friends duet in the "Cannon Song" ("Army Song"). In the next scene, Polly returns home and defiantly announces that she has married Mack by singing the "Barbara Song." She stands fast against Mr. and Mrs. Peachum's anger, but she does let slip Brown's connection to Mack, which they will use to their advantage. Act II Polly tells Mack that her father will have him arrested. He is finally persuaded that Peachum has enough influence to do it and makes arrangements to leave London, explaining his bandit "business" to Polly so she can manage it in his absence. Before he leaves town, he stops at his favorite brothel, where he sees his ex-­‐lover, Jenny. They sing the "Pimp's Ballad" ("Tango Ballad") about their days together, but Mack doesn't know Mrs. Peachum has bribed Jenny to turn him in. Despite Brown's apologies, there's nothing he can do, and off Mack goes to jail. After he sings the "Ballad of the Easy Life," another girlfriend, Lucy (Brown's daughter) and Polly show up at the same time, setting the stage for a nasty argument that builds to the "Jealousy Duet." After Polly leaves, Lucy engineers Mack's escape. When Mr. Peachum finds out, he confronts Brown and informs him that he will unleash all of his beggars during Queen Victoria's coronation parade, ruining the ceremony and costing Brown his job. Act III Jenny comes to the Peachums' shop to demand her bribe money, which Mrs. Peachum refuses to pay. Jenny reveals that Mack is at Suky Tawdry's house. When Brown arrives, determined to arrest Peachum and the beggars, he is horrified to learn that the beggars are already in position and only Mr. Peachum can stop them. To placate Peachum, Brown's only option is to arrest Mack and have him executed. In the next scene, Mack is back in jail and desperately trying to raise enough of a bribe to get out again, even as the gallows are being assembled. Soon it becomes clear that neither Polly nor the gang members can raise any money, and Mack prepares to die. Then a sudden reversal: A messenger on horseback arrives to announce that Macheath has been pardoned by the Queen and granted a castle and pension. The cast then sings the Finale, which ends with a plea that wrongdoing not be punished too harshly. Source: http://www.threepennyopera.org/storySynopsis.php 2 The playwright The Threepenny Opera (German: Die Dreigroschenoper) is a play with musical elements by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, in collaboration with translator Elisabeth Hauptmann and set designer Caspar Neher. It was adapted from an 18th-­‐century English ballad opera, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and offers a Socialist critique of the capitalist world. It opened on 31 August 1928 at Berlin's Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. By 1933, when Brecht and Weill were forced to leave Germany by Hitler's Machtergreifung, the play had been translated into 18 languages and performed more than 10,000 times on European stages. Songs from The Threepenny Opera have been widely covered and become standards, most notably "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" ("The Ballad of Mack the Knife") and "Seeräuberjenny" ("Pirate Jenny"). Bertolt Brecht, original name Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (born Feb. 10, 1898, Augsburg, Ger.—died Aug. 14, 1956, East Berlin), German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer whose epic theatre departed from the conventions of theatrical illusion and developed the drama as a social and ideological forum for leftist causes. Until 1924 Brecht lived in Bavaria, where he was born, studied medicine (Munich, 1917–21), and served in an army hospital (1918). From this period date his first play, Baal (produced 1923); his first success, Trommeln in der Nacht (Kleist Preis, 1922; Drums in the Night); the poems and songs collected as Die Hauspostille (1927; A Manual of Piety, 1966), his first professional production (Edward II, 1924); and his admiration for Wedekind, Rimbaud, Villon, and Kipling. During this period he also developed a violently antibourgeois attitude that reflected his generation’s deep disappointment in the civilization that had come crashing down at the end of World War I. Among Brecht’s friends were members of the Dadaist group, who aimed at destroying what they condemned as the false standards of bourgeois art through derision and iconoclastic satire. The man who taught him the elements of Marxism in the late 1920s was Karl Korsch, an eminent Marxist theoretician who had been a Communist member of the Reichstag but had been expelled from the German Communist Party in 1926. In Berlin (1924–33) he worked briefly for the directors Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator, but mainly with his own group of associates. With the composer Kurt Weill he wrote the satirical, successful ballad opera Die Dreigroschenoper (1928; The Threepenny Opera) and the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930; Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny). He also wrote what he called “Lehr-­‐stücke” (“exemplary plays”)—badly didactic works for performance outside the orthodox theatre—to music by Weill, Hindemith, and Hanns Eisler. In these years he developed his theory of “epic theatre” and an austere form of irregular verse. He also became a Marxist. In 1933 he went into exile—in Scandinavia (1933–41), mainly in Denmark, and then in the United States (1941–47), where he did some film work in Hollywood. In Germany his books were burned and his citizenship was withdrawn. He was cut off from the German theatre; but between 1937 and 1941 he wrote most of his great plays, his major theoretical essays and dialogues, and many of the poems collected as Svendborger Gedichte (1939). The plays of these years became famous in the author’s own and other productions: notable among them are Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1941; Mother Courage and Her Children), a chronicle play of the Thirty Years’ War; Leben des Galilei (1943; The Life of Galileo); Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (1943; The Good Woman of Setzuan), a 3 parable play set in prewar China; Der Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (1957; The Resistible Risea parable play of Hitler’s rise to power set in prewar Chicago; Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (1948; Herr Puntila and His Man Matti), a Volksstück (popular play) about a Finnish farmer who oscillates between churlish sobriety and drunken good humour; and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (first produced in English, 1948; Der kaukasische Kreidekreis, 1949), the story of a struggle for possession of a child between its highborn mother, who deserts it, and the servant girl who looks after it. Brecht left the United States in 1947 after having had to give evidence before the House Un-­‐
American Activities Committee. He spent a year in Zürich, working mainly on Antigone-­‐Modell 1948 (adapted from Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles; produced 1948) and on his most important theoretical work, the Kleines Organon für das Theater (1949; “A Little Organum for the Theatre”). The essence of his theory of drama, as revealed in this work, is the idea that a truly Marxist drama must avoid the Aristotelian premise that the audience should be made to believe that what they are witnessing is happening here and now. For he saw that if the audience really felt that the emotions of heroes of the past—Oedipus, or Lear, or Hamlet—could equally have been their own reactions, then the Marxist idea that human nature is not constant but a result of changing historical conditions would automatically be invalidated. Brecht therefore argued that the theatre should not seek to make its audience believe in the presence of the characters on the stage—should not make it identify with them, but should rather follow the method of the epic poet’s art, which is to make the audience realize that what it sees on the stage is merely an account of past events that it should watch with critical detachment. Hence, the “epic” (narrative, nondramatic) theatre is based on detachment, on the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), achieved through a number of devices that remind the spectator that he is being presented with a demonstration of human behaviour in scientific spirit rather than with an illusion of reality, in short, that the theatre is only a theatre and not the world itself. In 1949 Brecht went to Berlin to help stage Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (with his wife, Helene Weigel, in the title part) at Reinhardt’s old Deutsches Theater in the Soviet sector. This led to formation of the Brechts’ own company, the Berliner Ensemble, and to permanent return to Berlin. Henceforward the Ensemble and the staging of his own plays had first claim on Brecht’s time. Often suspect in eastern Europe because of his unorthodox aesthetic theories and denigrated or boycotted in the West for his Communist opinions, he yet had a great triumph at the Paris Théâtre des Nations in 1955, and in the same year in Moscow he received a Stalin Peace Prize. He died of a heart attack in East Berlin the following year. Brecht was, first, a superior poet, with a command of many styles and moods. As a playwright he was an intensive worker, a restless piecer-­‐together of ideas not always his own (The Threepenny Opera is based on John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, and Edward II on Marlowe), a sardonic humorist, and a man of rare musical and visual awareness; but he was often bad at creating living characters or at giving his plays tension and shape. As a producer he liked lightness, clarity, and firmly knotted narrative sequence; a perfectionist, he forced the German theatre, against its nature, to underplay. As a theoretician he made principles out of his preferences—and even out of his faults. KURT WEILL The son of a cantor, Kurt Weill (1900-­‐1950) was raised in a religious Jewish home in Dessau, Germany. He took an early interest in music; his first teacher was Albert Bing, conductor at the local opera house. At eighteen, Weill went to Berlin, experiencing its political and artistic ferment firsthand. A few months' study with Engelbert Humperdinck did not satisfy him, but late in 1920 he began an intensive association with Ferruccio Busoni in the composition seminar at the Akademie der Künste. By the end of 1923, he had had five full-­‐length works performed in Germany. The next 4 few years brought further success: a popular violin concerto and his first opera, The Protagonist (1926, Georg Kaiser). Through Kaiser, Weill met the actress Lotte Lenya in Berlin in 1924, and they married in January 1926. They were divorced from 1933-­‐1937, but they remarried and stayed together until his death. Weill's early works show the influence of post-­‐romanticism, expressionism, even atonality. Yet the desire to create "freer, lighter, and simpler" music grew on him. The early operas Royal Palace (1927) and The Czar Has his Photograph Taken (1928) show the influence of jazz and popular music. He began working with Bertolt Brecht in the spring of 1927, setting the "Mahagonny" poems. Mahagonny's hummable tunes and thoroughgoing popular influence seemed calculated to shock the avant-­‐garde; the charge that he had "sold out" to commercialism and abandoned art followed him thereafter. Later compositions, like The Threepenny Opera and Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny elaborated on his popular style. But a much different style animates other works with Brecht, such as He Who Says Yes, an opera for students, and The Lindbergh Flight, a cantata. The collaboration with Brecht ended around 1930, and Weill's last two compositions in Germany were written with others: The Pledge (1932, Caspar Neher) and The Silver Lake (1933, Georg Kaiser). Hitler's ascent in 1933 forced Weill to leave Germany, never to return. He spent two frustrating years in Paris, finding little sympathy for his new compositions: The Seven Deadly Sins (1933, Brecht), A Kingdom for a Cow (1935, Robert Vambery), and the Second Symphony (1934). His work on The Eternal Road (1937, Franz Werfel), a pageant based on the Old Testament, brought him to the U.S. in September 1935. Weill's American career was as active as his European career. He had two major successes on Broadway: Lady in the Dark (1941, Moss Hart and Ira Gershwin) and One Touch of Venus (1943, Ogden Nash and S.J. Perelman). His most important works for Broadway, at least in terms of influence, were probably Street Scene (1947, Elmer Rice and Langston Hughes) and Love Life (1948, Alan Jay Lerner). Weill considered Street Scene a "Broadway opera," and his project of making opera more palatable to Broadway audiences was carried forward by Menotti, Blitzstein, and Bernstein. Several experts have pointed to Love Life as the precursor of the "concept musical," influencing Fosse, Sondheim, and Kander & Ebb. All together, he brought eight shows to Broadway and saw three other stage works produced in the U.S. Weill's constant hard work and family history of hypertension caught up with him early in 1950. While his last work, Lost in the Stars (1949, Maxwell Anderson), still ran on Broadway, and shortly after he and Anderson had begun a musical version of Huckleberry Finn, Weill had a heart attack and was hospitalized in New York City, where he died on April 3. Source: http://www.kwf.org/brief-­‐biography-­‐600-­‐words 5 Character study Peachum is Macheath’s antagonist, the character who opposes the hero and sets the plot in motion. Self-­‐interest motivates Peachum throughout The Threepenny Opera. His only concern is making a profit with his business. Throughout the play, Peachum does not change. He never sways from trying to keep what is his. However, when the queen frees Macheath at the end of the play, Peachum gives up and accepts defeat. This moment of defeat is the only instance in which Peachum experiences a change within himself. Peachum is an ironic villain. Traditionally, the villain would pursue evil essentially for the sake of evil. He would be someone who does horrible things because he is innately bad. This kind of villain actually reinforces traditional moral positions by making the audience see how awful a person is without them. Peachum, however, is the play’s strongest advocate of traditional morality. He obeys the law, reads the Bible, and wants his daughter to respect her parents. Yet he reads the Bible and obeys the law only because he thinks these activities will aide his business, not because he desires to be a noble citizen. Peachum’s use of traditional morality to justify his cruelty is a powerful way to emphasize both the arbitrariness of values and hypocrisy of religion. Source: http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/threepenny/canalysis.html Peachum is cynical and uncompromising throughout the play, although he does admit defeat at the end when the Queen frees Macheath. Interestingly, Peachum displays many of the traditional morals an audience would not expect from a villain such as obeying the law and reading the bible, although the reason for this is only because he believes it will make his business more viable. Again, Brecht is questioning what we expect from a traditional villain, and raising the issue of what makes someone evil. Source: www.wyp.org.uk/media/27948/3p%20Opera%20Resource%20Pack.doc http://www.anniecosper.com/renderings.html
6 Context Brecht’s times: the historical context of The Threepenny Opera "The cities were still there, the houses not yet bombed and in ruins, but the victims were millions of people. They had lost their fortunes, their savings; they were dazed and inflation-­‐shocked and did not understand how it had happened to them and who the foe was who had defeated them. Yet they had lost their self-­‐assurance, their feeling that they themselves could be the masters of their own lives if only they worked hard enough; and lost, too, were the old values of morals, of ethics, of decency." Pearl Buck, 1923. When we think of the times in which Brecht lived, they are punctuated by war, political upheaval, and financial chaos. World War One was the beginning of the economic and social downturn that Germany experienced in the first half of the twentieth century. Just quickly refer to the quote above to give it a more specific context of what it is describing – sometimes you have to tell the reader what the read and what to focus on. This war was one unlike any other; the scale of destruction, the deadly new technology, the extreme loss of life on both the battlefield and back at home was shocking and devastating for the people of Europe. While Brecht managed to avoid serving in the military until the tail end of the war, he would have still been affected by the extreme impact of the war on his country, and on the German individual. Even after the war there was no peace; massive political upheaval overturned the crown and made Germany a republic in 1918 and the Versailles Treaty made Germany responsible for the war and decimated their economy with war reparations, paid to other European countries. Though the Socialists who had power of the new republic focused heavily on reform, which saw women receive the vote and the introduction of the welfare system, the country was financially distraught for the better part of a decade. When hyperinflation struck, there were few left untouched. At its height in 1923, one trillion German marks was equal to one American dollar and the stories of people taking a wheelbarrow full of money to the shops to buy a loaf of bread was not just a fairy story. Towards the tail end of the 1920’s, Germany invested heavily in American banks and became more financially stable, especially the burgeoning middle-­‐class. It is this bourgeois that Brecht comments on in the The Threepenny Opera; the people who veil the lack of values, ethics and decency that Pearl Buck describes, with socially acceptable practices like big business. If you look close enough, there is much in this historical context, and in this play that mirrors contemporary Australia; the global financial crisis, an increasing number of people living in poverty, police corruption, a glamorized criminal underworld, Workchoices legislation, we even have a brothel opening in Toowoomba! The important thing with this play is to look for where it crosses with your own life in this society, and what you feel is unfair and unjust. That, really, is the heart of Brecht. The Beggar’s Opera: the original Threepenny Opera The Beggar’s Opera has enormous significance as an opera of the people, and it is only natural that Brecht would choose such a political and accessible work to adapt to portray his Germany. The Beggar’s Opera author, John Gay, enjoyed quite surprising success with the opera when premiered 7 at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1728. The show ran for 62 consecutive performances, the longest run in British theatre history at that time, and in 1920, it began an astounding run of 1,463 performances at the Lyric Theatre in London, proving that Gay’s opera transcends era and genre. Set to music by Johann Christoph Pepusch and a ballad opera by nature, the piece satirised the government, well-­‐
known British figures, and the popular Italian opera. Most of the songs in the opera were based on popular tunes, so the common people in the audience could identify with characters and sing along to the songs. This gave the play a real political edge; it had great artistic merit, yet was accessible to all the people of London. The character of Peachum was famously based on Jonathon Wild, the Thief Taker of London and Ireland, but stands in the drama for Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister of London. In his adaptation, Brecht has taken quite a creative license; he has given his Macheath some of Peachum’s dialogue, plus Peachum’s friendship with Lockit (Brown in The Threepenny Opera) is also given to Mac. Polly and Lucy’s fight, however, remains very similar in text, with some of The Beggar’s Opera text going straight into the adaptation. This adaptation raises a few questions; are Peachum and Macheath more similar than different? One is openly a criminal; the other performs criminal acts under the guise of business. Keep this in mind when watching this production, as it may have some interesting results! Source: https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/magazine/posts/2011/july/qa-­‐anna-­‐cordingley 8 Theatrical styles Epic Theatre is an instructive theatre style that addresses the issues of modern society. Made famous by Brecht, and developed prominently when he was in exile, it had many influences; the theatre of Erwin Piscator and German Agitational Propaganda, cabaret, music hall comedy, American silent film, and even Elizabethan plays. Brecht says that it is a theatre style chiefly interested in the attitudes which people adopt towards on another, wherever they are socio-­‐historically significant (Brecht on Theatre 86). The idea behind this style is that the audience should be put in the position where they can make comparisons about everything that influences the way human beings behave (Brecht on Theatre 86). An important difference between the naturalistic theatre style and Epic Theatre is the engendering of illusion. In Brechtian theatre, there is no preparation towards illusion; the audience is always made aware that they are watching a play, that the actors are playing parts, the technology of the theatre is visible, and the actors speak straight to the audience, ignoring the convention of the fourth wall. All of these elements cause the audience to never become emotionally involved with the characters; they are constantly reminded that it is a play, and instead the focus is placed on the social and political significance of the events in the play. Cabaret: Cabaret is a theatrical form, which is a kind of variety show, popular from the late 1800’s until about 1940 in Europe, and especially Germany. It utilizes a mixture of many different performance forms; the term is derived from a divided serving tray of hors d’oeuvres, as it offers a little bit of something for everybody. A cabaret program is typically a series of individual acts; dances, poems, songs, comic monologues, impersonations, and sketches, to name a few. The performances traditionally took place in a small bar or pub where the audience was seated at small tables, eating and drinking through the performance. WWI German cabarets primarily existed to entertain their audiences’, though they also commented on popular and current events and used satire to critique current events. The more political and oppositional style, which emerged after WWI, named Kabarett by the satirist Kurt Tucholsky, was created to take an adversarial stance on society in order to make change. Through the 1920’s, Cabaret moved from being an underground, avant-­‐garde medium to being a popular entertainment for the European public. Brecht himself performed in cabaret, singing while he played his guitar, and his experiences both performing in, and watching cabaret, had great influence on his style and, specifically, the work of The Threepenny Opera. Sources for this style: the films Cabaret (1972) and The Blue Angel (1930). German expressionism: German Expressionism was coined as a term in 1901, and it describes a movement that swept across many fields of the arts; film, theatre, visual art. It was a highly emotional artistic movement, which focused on the manifestation of the internal, which could be nightmarish and grotesque. The movement was very prominent in film, with famous works like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922) came to the fore, with their use of jagged scenery, stark black and white, shadows and nightmarish concepts. When we consider that these films emerged after a war that decimated much of Europe, where nightmares were a reality every day, it is not hard to see that the subject matter is simply art imitating life. In USQ’s production of 9 Threepenny Opera, our set and costume design has been greatly influenced by this movement; the set features jagged lines and dark colors, tinged with red. The costumes compliment this; they are torn, mostly dark and dirty shades with violent shocks of blood red on fingernails and collars. These design choices give the show a dirty, underground and dangerous feel, which fits the subject matter perfectly. Sources for this style: the films The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922) and Metropolis (1927). Source: artsworx.com.au/wp.../the_threepenny_opera_teachers_notes_613KB.pd. Interpretations of the character Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/theater/reviews/21thre.html AND you thought those crazy, hazy nights when Studio 54 sizzled were strictly a thing of the past. Think again, disco boys and girls. Why right now — on the very spot where Halston, Liza, Bianca and Andy once held sybaritic court — you can watch the same kinds of revels they might have witnessed in the 1970's, thanks to the shrill, numbing revival of "The Threepenny Opera" that opened at the theater at Studio 54 last night. Cross-­‐dressed men and women in writhing sexual pretzels; leather boys and glitter queens vacuuming up piles of snow with their nostrils; strobe lights, neon lights and, yes, disco-­‐ball lights. There's even a bare-­‐chested hunk in a gold lamé bathing suit who arrives on a flying golden horse, summoning sweet memories of that fab birthday party for Bianca. (Or was it Liz?) All of this is once again on tap via the Roundabout Theater Company. There's one big difference: nobody in the current incarnation of those days of swine and poses seems to be having any fun. This is one party where the hangover begins almost as soon as the evening does. Almost two and a half years after the Roundabout's canny cash cow of a revival of "Cabaret" closed at Studio 54 (after more than five years in residence), the company is again inviting theatergoers to come to the cabaret, old chum. This time the occasion is Scott Elliott's production of the 1928 show that made musicals like "Cabaret" and "Chicago" possible: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "Threepenny Opera" is the granddaddy of all the singing, stinging portraits of fat societies on their eves of destruction. Mr. Elliott has even recruited one of the stars of the Roundabout "Cabaret," Alan Cumming, who won a Tony playing the ghoulish M.C. in the Kander-­‐Ebb musical and who here portrays the murdering, whoring, stealing Macheath (Mac the Knife), the prince of thieves in stinking, corrupt London. But while it raises the kink quotient even higher than "Cabaret" did, this production has nothing like the same sustained point of view that might hook and hypnotize audiences. With Mr. Elliott overseeing a cast jam-­‐packed with misused talent (including the pop stars Cyndi Lauper and Nellie McKay), this "Threepenny" takes Brecht's notion of the theater of alienation to new self-­‐
defeating extremes. Created in the era in which "Cabaret" was set, "The Threepenny Opera" remains the most famous and popular example of what Brecht called "epic theater." Inspired by John Gay's rollicking "Beggar's Opera" (1728), "Threepenny" translated the tale of the villainous but irresistible Macheath and his 10 marauders into the age of Queen Victoria. But the show's real satiric targets were the middle classes of poverty-­‐crippled, rudderless Germany in the 1920's. Using deliberately artificial techniques — painted signs, scene-­‐setting titles, spoken asides and musical-­‐hall songs that often had little to do with the immediate plot — the play was designed to sustain an intellectual distance, to allow audiences to see their own reflections in vicious thugs, whores, beggars and policemen motivated by the same primal needs and instincts as themselves. The music, Brecht wrote, was meant to become "an active collaborator in the stripping bare of the middle-­‐class corpus of ideas." An immediate, scandalous hit in Europe, "Threepenny" failed to generate the same frissons when it first arrived in New York in 1933. Writing of its Broadway premiere in The New York Times, Lewis Nichols described it as "a gently mad evening in the theater for those who like their spades in the usual nomenclature of the earnest." It wasn't until the fabled Off Broadway revival at the Theater de Lys in 1954 — with Weill's widow, Lotte Lenya, as the prostitute Jenny — that "Threepenny" achieved popular success in Manhattan. That production used a translation by Marc Blitzstein that is probably still the best-­‐known English version but is regarded by purists as a softened and sanitized interpretation. Certainly no such complaints can be lodged against the new translation by the playwright Wallace Shawn, whose rendering is both more densely lyrical (with some cumbersome poetic tropes in the songs) and explicitly obscene than any I know. This is a show that doesn't hesitate to call sexual organs and acts by their most common names, loudly and repeatedly. In the same spirit Mr. Elliott has chosen to make full use of a freedom from censorship that Brecht could only have envied. So in this version Macheath's love interests include not only the usual component of female whores (most notably Ms. Lauper as Jenny), but also their male counterparts. Macheath again finds himself torn between two brides: the demi-­‐virginal Polly Peachum (Ms. McKay) and Lucy Brown (Brian Charles Rooney). But in this case Lucy is a man, who makes a point of showing the audience exactly what lies beneath his skirt. Macheath's friendship with Tiger Brown (Christopher Innvar), Lucy's father and the chief of police, is of the crotch-­‐grabbing, kissing kind. And for a copulatory free-­‐for-­‐all brothel sequence, the participants' underwear glows luridly beneath a black light. (Jason Lyons did the lighting, which allows for Brechtian signage to be writ in neon and L.C.D. supertitles.) Isaac Mizrahi created the costumes here, in a smorgasbord of salacious styles, from a cleavage-­‐
flashing Chanel-­‐style suit to the "Blue Angel"-­‐style chanteuse get-­‐ups worn by Ms. Lauper. Most of the clothes, plucked from racks on Derek McLane's naked it's-­‐only-­‐a-­‐play set, suggest that their wearers have just come from frolicking in the back room of a leather bar. This includes Mr. Cumming's Macheath, who trades in the character's usual gentlemanly suit and bowler for a punkish ensemble and a Mohawk. The performances are just as widely varied and as bereft of character-­‐defining purpose. Everything seems done for isolated shock effect, without any regard to how one stylistic component might relate to another, so it's impossible to intuit exactly what society is being skewered. Looking like Dietrich and sounding like a Brooklyn Piaf, Ms. Lauper delivers Jenny's ballads with teary, soulful intensity. She also leads, in Lenya-­‐like style, the show's famous prologue, "Song of the Extraordinary Crimes of Mac the Knife." That marvelous trouper Jim Dale plays Mr. Peachum, Polly's father and the head of a vast network of beggars, in the seedy music-­‐hall style of Laurence Olivier in 11 "The Entertainer." As his wife, Ana Gasteyer talks like a shrill Scarsdale matron and sings penetratingly in a voice of a hundred trumpets. Mr. Cumming brings much conviction and agony to Macheath's songs of the oppressed in the prison and hanging scenes. But there's little sense of the menacing charisma that keeps all of London atremble. Ms. McKay, the inventive and seriously talented young singer-­‐songwriter ("Get Away From Me"), comes closest to achieving a Brechtian effect. Clad in trailing pre-­‐Raphaelite bridal white, her Polly speaks and sings with a flat, deadpan sincerity that suggests sugary blandness can accommodate a multitude of sins. It's a brave, carefully thought-­‐out performance, though its willful affectlessness means that songs like "Pirate Jenny" (restored to Polly here, as in the original version) have no chance of being showstoppers. The only songs delivered at full throttle are those that tell the audience members how rotten they are: "Certain Things Make Our Life Impossible," "How Do Humans Live?," "Cry From the Grave." But in presenting Brecht's lowlifes as exotic, feckless party animals instead of as pseudo-­‐bourgeois materialists, Mr. Elliott keeps these characters at more of a distance from us than Brecht surely ever intended. Their censoriousness registers as just a random dip in a pharmaceutically induced roller coaster of moods. Another line of cocaine or two, and these hedonists will forget all about the poor and hungry The Threepenny Opera is a satirical work by German writer Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, and adapted from the 18th century composition The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay. It parodies the capitalist society of the day, and its obsession with material gain, and is as perfectly relevant today as it was in Brecht and Weill’s 1928 Germany, or indeed John Gay’s 18th century England. It is unapologetically bawdy, set among a world of gangsters, prostitutes and beggars in London’s underbelly, where morality is a distant concept and loyalty is traded on a whim. The story is told in a series of vignettes, linked by a narrator, a suave David Shannon – the only character not on the make. David Ganly excels as the gangster Mac the Knife, full of volatility and bluster, and he and his mismatched goons dominate the entire auditorium. Each member of this very large cast is outstanding, both as part of the ensemble and individually. Other highlights include Mr. Peachum (Mark O’Regan), deliciously Fagin-­‐like, and his harpy wife, played by the magnificent Jackie Marks. Charlotte McCurry as Polly Peachum and Ruth McGill as Lucy Brown are perfect as the yin and yang love interests of Mac, and their duet is one of the highlights of the production. Hilda Fay brings wonderful depth to her role as Low-­‐Dive Jenny, the hooker with heart. There is foolishness aplenty, too, from dancing policemen to awkward striptease, but, aside from the laughs, it is the technical elements that impress the most. Musical direction is by Cathal Synnott, and the very talented 8-­‐piece orchestra on stage, led by Synnott, lends a period feel. This is a very demanding score, and the challenge is ably met by professional and non-­‐professional singers alike. Choreography by Philip Connaughton is slick, deceptively simple and perfectly co-­‐ordinated, and dovetails beautifully with the 1920s look and feel of the production. Ciarán O’Melia’s set design is uncomplicated, with set changes frequently incorporated into the action, and even though the sheer amount of activity on stage can be a little too frantic at times, this is a clever way of handling the many scene changes that are required. There are echoes, variously, of My Fair Lady, Cabaret, Oliver and the work of Fritz Lang, and yes, there is an awful lot going on, but this production transcends pantomime to reach the realm of 12 something very special. Wayne Jordan has worked his usual magic with his direction, and the result is ravishment by theatre – a glorious, insane, rambunctious, astonishing and raucous ride. It would be criminal to miss it. Source: http://entertainment.ie/theatre/feature/The-­‐Threepenny-­‐Opera-­‐Gate-­‐Theatre-­‐DTF-­‐2013/211/4796.htm Images http://www.iocapecod.com/arts/threepenny_opera_an_old_lesson_about_a_contemporary_crisis http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/theatre/the-­‐threepenny-­‐opera-­‐20100603-­‐x6pe.html Source: http://amandamuggleton.com.au/?p=299 13 14