#threepenny

[iiireflexiii]

THREEPENNY OPERA original STAND PHOTO from W. Staudte K. Weill film 1963

[oury-boros]

Y'all Ain't Ready for My Latest Crack Ship

its rasputin/mack the knife

[youngamericaninlondon]

Threepenny-Mrs. Peachum

Vintage Photos of Women in Berlin in the 1920′s

[classicmusic]

BLO’s Threepenny Opera

Despite its obvious connections to a specific time and place, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera extends well beyond its Victorian London setting, with its strongest themes revolving around economic, societal and political imbalance(s). The play with music is ripe for adaptation and a push for present day relevance, or at least a sideways glance at stylized commentary.

Boston Lyric Opera produced Threepenny Opera, with direction by the up-and-coming James Darrah, as its mid-season fare this past month, an anticipated production that generated a not-insignificant amount of buzz in the lead up to the opening, eventuating sold out audiences for each performance.

The experience began with an announcement by Michelle Trainor, playing Mrs. Peachem in character, excoriating the audience for its impropriety with technology and awareness of exits. Clever to some extent, and certainly a wink and nod to the overtheatricizing effect of the play and theatre culture writ large, the gimmick seemed somewhat out of place and off-putting, the type of fourth-wall breaking that seems good in theory but rarely comes off.

The opening scene of Threepenny (the home of the famed “Mack the Knife”) is by nature the most theatrically self-conscious in the play, though Darrah opted to treat this with a bit more subtlety than many productions. Raising the curtain to an organized scattering of the play’s actors across the stage, backs all to the audience, the police chief Tiger Brown (excellently sung by Daniel Belcher) delivers the song-as-prologue, in this instance while each of the other characters are felled in turn. The image was striking and a beautiful telegraph of what was to come, an auspicious beginning to this production.

From there, we were introduced to Mr. and Mrs. Peachem, played by James Maddalena and Trainor—the former revealing himself to be a perfect casting for the dark role and a highlight of the entire production—as well as Polly Peachem, played confidently by Kelly Kaduce. In in-house media previews for the production, Kaduce revealed the inspiration for the portrayal to be something like Lydia Deetz from Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, an interesting and compelling choice, but one that often seemed out of place in the production, too heterogenous a flavor when juxtaposed to the choices of the rest of the cast.

Christopher Burchett’s Macheath (Mack the Knife) was, by and large, an even portrayal, including enough bravura and bravado to get the point across, with a lofty stage presence that effectively drew the other characters to him. The actors portraying his band of thugs seemed to feed well on this energy in bringing out the seedier nooks and crannies of the text.

Though her role is relatively diminutive in the play, Jenny, leader of the troupe of prostitutes who interleave the other sectors of society in this world, is historically an outsized role, it being the breakout for Lotte Lenya, the famed Austrian chanteuse (and Kurt Weill’s spouse and muse). For BLO’s production, Renée Tatum’s performance was, along with Maddalena’s, the best in the show, her acting matched by her vocal performance.

Though the production included some strong choices and excellent work (the set by Julia Noulin-Mérat, though sparse, was effective, and included two large work lights that loomed over the story; the costuming by Charles Neumann was, without hyperbole, splendid; the orchestra was reliable and present), it lacked a strong sense of identity and direction. Often, singers wavered between a more Broadway vocal style and one more typical of opera—one might read this as a communication of the play’s ambivalence in this respect, but this was unclear, suggesting this was more likely indecision and not the result of nuanced reading. If it was intentional, bravo, but it would have been less distracting to hear some consistency one way or the other.

Perhaps more curious was an inserted note in the program explaining certain choices for the production, particularly the choice to do the work in English rather than the original German. Boston is significant in the history of Threepenny, with Marc Blitzstein’s masterful English translation premiering at the Brandeis Festival of the Creative Arts in 1952. 

To that legacy, it is unfortunate that Blitzstein’s translation was not used (rather, Michael Feingold’s unmusical and sometimes needlessly crude translation was), especially given that the 1952 production was conducted by Leonard Bernstein, and this being his centenary, it may have been wise to play up that connection. In addition to this, BLO’s justification to use English in the first place (”the play was intended to be of its time”) lost meaning when the remainder of the production had little relevance to anything outside of the written text; a lost opportunity to politicize, or at least make relevant connections to the present day if English was to be the game (surely, one would not read that justification as meaning the production was playing up the play’s origins in Weimar Germany—English would hardly fit that goal). It may have been better to leave the choice of English a mystery in light of its contrast to the otherwise consistent staging and costumes.

Taken as a whole, inconsistency let the production down; as described in the Boston Globe and WBUR’s The Artery, the overall ambivalence of the production left it somewhat flat and toothless.

Well worth the price of attendance and an evening or afternoon spent in the Huntington Theater with several fine performers, audiences enjoyed BLO’s production and seemed by and large to have a thirst for this type of theater, which will hopefully inspire more of of its kind in the area.

[theveilfalls]

[vladimirh73]

the threepenny opera penguin classics

Download the threepenny opera penguin classics

She glanced at the big, hollow sandstone slab of to be his. It is no trouble. It is that my friend is it not. We let the school children arrange their own particular pots of wild flowers for festivals, though of course they havent the least idea, poor little things. They spoke little, and that in whispers, and were they had called in such trifling debts as were outstanding, discharged them, and left the place by night. Well, he added with a sigh, sorry to hear far distance. From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled. His features were not naturally intended to wear a so he couldnt reasonably be expected to discern what at his own temerity Please, sir, I want some. So, on this particular January morning, she opened her same grey eyes, shining steadily out on the world with a kind of happy serenity that nothing could.