Threepenny Opera Boston Lyric Opera Boston Globe Review
Review
'Threepenny Opera' At Boston Lyric Opera: Oh The Shark Doesn't Quite Bite With His Teeth, Love
"The Threepenny Opera" was the sensation of the 1928 Berlin theater season. It consolidated the careers of its creators, composer Kurt Weill and poet/playwright Bertolt Brecht, and the glory of Lotte Lenya, Weill's wife, who played the featured (but not leading) role of Jenny Diver. In 1931, the evidence was made into a bang-up movie past G.W. Pabst (with Lenya's office expanded). In 1933, it opened on Broadway and closed after 12 performances.
Just in 1952, at the Brandeis Festival of Creative Arts, Leonard Bernstein conducted a new English version, with a translation by composer/librettist Marc Blitzstein, and starring Lenya. In 1954, that version, still with Lenya, opened at the Theatre De Lys and became one of the longest-running hits in off-Broadway history (2,611 performances!). The cast also included the appealing Jo Sullivan, Charlotte Rae and Beatrice Arthur, all establishing themselves as major new personalities. The cast anthology — despite (or because of?) MGM Records insisting that Blitzstein make clean upwards Brecht's virtually graphic lyrics — is still in impress.
This irresistibly tuneful, bitterly satiric musical drama was an updating of John Gay'due south 1727 "Beggar's Opera," which had been translated into German language by Brecht'southward lover Elisabeth Hauptmann. (Laurence Olivier and Dorothy Tutin star in an enchanting 1953 film version directed past Peter Brook.) Following Gay, Brecht turns traditional personal and political morals upside down. The Peachums don't heed their daughter Polly sleeping with the notorious criminal Macheath (Mack the Knife) but don't want her to risk losing her power over him if she marries him. The gangland leader's best friend is the police chief. The abiding moral is: Food comes commencement, then morality. And as with Gay, given Weill's kaleidoscope of musical styles, even opera itself is a target of the satire.
Since Brandeis, Boston has given us some notable "Threepenny" productions. Sarah Caldwell directed one in 1988, with Phyllis Curtin as Mrs. Peachum, and sopranos Sarah Reese equally Jenny and Jeanne Ommerle as Polly. And back in 1965, Timothy Mayer (who is probably best known for his product of Brecht's "Mother Courage" starring Linda Hunt at the Boston Shakespeare Company), staged "Threepenny Opera" at Harvard's Agassiz Theatre, with an unforgettable young Stockard Channing. Here's what the Harvard Cherry-red had to say most her performance:
Almost halfway through "The Threepenny Opera" last dark, [Stockard] Channing walked out onto the Agassiz stage to sing. She plays Jenny — Lotte Lenya's old office. She is supposed to be a tough whore, and she looks like a kewpie doll. She has a sweet, smooth vocalization. ... So what does she do? Does she ugly upward her phonation, play the sex queen, scatter knowing winks? Not a fleck of information technology. She only stands there and sings. ... And equally the song gets grizzlier she sings softer and softer, until she'due south about whispering — almost piles of expressionless bodies. It was chilling.
Would there were such chilling moments in the Boston Lyric Opera's new production. I was excited to see it on this season's roster. And the intimate Huntington Avenue Theatre seemed an ideal venue. There was a strong cast, and it was beingness staged by James Darrah, a hot young director from LA with an impressive list of creds, including banana to Peter Sellars.
Things start propitiously. On an eerie, fog-bound phase, mysterious figures are standing like statues. The Street-Vocalizer (baritone Daniel Belcher, who returns subsequently as Tiger Brown, the corrupt police chief) circles the stage singing the famous "Moritat" (murder ballad) near the crimes of Mack the Pocketknife, and as he mimes slashing these figures, they drop downwards almost in slow motion. This quietly sinister passage, aided immeasurably past Pablo Santiago's dramatic lighting, is all besides rare in this product.
Before the opera starts, mezzo-soprano Michelle Trainor, dressed in Mrs. Peachum's antiquated rags, appears in a box seat and yells at the audition to plow off all jail cell phones and take detect of the leave signs. She'due south hilarious (and in fact the residual of that evening was cell-phone free). Unfortunately, this gauche note remains her simply note.
Some of the singing is quite good, especially by soprano Kelly Kaduce, familiar to BLO audiences equally Mimi, Butterfly, and Thais. But she's trapped by Darrah's formulation of Polly not as an ingénue, the innocent who learns the ropes when Macheath, evading capture, leaves her to run the gang's business concern. In her spoken dialogue she "uglies up" her voice with an unidentifiable rancid working-course accent (Roseanne Barr?). She's already streetwise. Soprano Chelsea Basler's Lucy, Macheath's meaning ex, is similarly heavy-handed. Kaduce and Basler, in their climactic "Jealousy Duet," end up smushing block in each other's faces. Even Daniel Belcher's Tiger Brown overacts his excessive fondness for Macheath.
"Threepenny Opera" thrives on its unique combination of meanness and sentiment. But all the screaming and shrieking, yelling and cackling, and the totally uncalled-for slapstick are neither moving, nor witty, nor even particularly funny. Merely tiresome.
Only baritones Christopher Burchett and James Maddalena don't succumb to this relentless overstatement. Maddalena (Peter Sellars'due south first Don Giovanni and the original Nixon in the Sellars/Adams "Nixon in China") is Peachum, Brecht'southward parody of a gangland — and marriage — boss, who runs all the beggars in London. He's a humorless, sober-sided Digger O'Dell type, grimly moralizing. And he stands out.
Burchett has a ringing phonation, and as well tends to downplay. He was superb in multiple roles in last year'due south BLO production of Marc-Anthony Turnage'due south "Greek" and outstanding as 1 of the lighthouse keepers in BLO's memorable 2012 production of Peter Maxwell Davies' "The Lighthouse." Simply Macheath, the center of everyone's attention, needs to exude charisma, sexuality and menace. But instead of a cynosure, Burchett is a cypher. In that location'due south fiddling chemistry between him and either Polly or Lucy, or Jenny, the whore he tin can't give up even when his life depends on it (sung past large-voiced mezzo-soprano Renée Tatum, who sings Wagner roles at the Met). Their seductive, nostalgic tango-duet was barely a tango (no choreographer is credited) let lone seductive.
One persistent weakness of the product is musical. It'due south nice to hear all the instruments Weill actually asks for — including saxophones, banjo, Hawaiian guitar, accordion, piano (the terrific Brett Hodgdon) and an electronic keyboard substituting for a harmonium. Weill bans all violins! But music managing director David Angus never commits himself wholeheartedly to Weill'due south vast spectrum of musical styles: dancehall tunes, street-corner ballads, army songs, hymns and oratorio chorales. He keeps things bouncing jollily forth, but everything sounds pretty much the same.
Check out this early 1930s recording of the suite from "Threepenny Opera" commissioned and led by the neat Otto Klemperer. With biting humor, sly insinuation, and a tragic sense of doom, Klemperer completely captures the exciting multiplicity of Weill's score.
In at least one style, Darrah deals with the music better than Angus. The songs in "Threepenny Opera" are often isolated musical numbers that don't further the plot. This has made them piece of cake to re-assign. Lenya somewhen sung more songs than were originally written for her. In 1954, Polly's "Barbara Song" was switched to Lucy, and Bea Arthur soared to the occasion. One of Darrah's all-time staging devices is the sudden lighting modify he has for each "number" — a lightning flash that blacks out the stage and puts the singer in the spotlight.
Another effective bit involves the ratty orange curtain that some of the characters pull beyond the forepart of the stage to hibernate what's behind it. The nuptials-nighttime scene betwixt Polly and Macheath ends with him mounting her doggy-style, at which indicate that orange drapery gets fatigued. When the newlyweds stick their heads out from a slit in the drape, Macheath's head is straight above Polly's. Information technology'south not really sexy, merely in its raunchy style, it's funny.
Like "The Beggar'south Opera," "Threepenny Opera" is prepare in London, this time on the occasion of Queen Victoria's coronation. But Julia Noulin-Mérat'southward abstruse and colorless gear up (as well difficult to negotiate), forth with Charles Neumann's catamenia-indeterminate costumes fit into Darrah'south desire to avoid specific identification with time or place. It's a missed opportunity.
There's one other serious problem. There are several English translations of Brecht'southward lyrics and libretto. Esther Nelson, the BLO'southward creative and full general managing director, told me that the visitor tried to get the new translation used recently past England's National Theatre, but the rights weren't available. And then the company resorted to the familiar but klutzy translation by Michael Feingold. I don't know why anyone would prefer this to the Blitzstein, which is so memorable — sly and pungent, and above all extremely musical. Virgil Thomson wrote in his 1954 review that Blitzstein's translation is "the finest affair of its kind in beingness. He has got the spirit of the play and rendered information technology powerfully, colloquially, compactly. And his English language versions of the songs are so apt prosodically, fit their music and then perfectly, that one can scarcely believe them to be translations at all."
Every bit a composer, Blitzstein knew which words would be nigh constructive on which notes. Take the haunting "Pirate Jenny" vocal, for case, the song for which the "Cerise" reviewer praised Stockard Channing. A literal translation of the refrain would exist, "And a ship with eight sails and with 50 cannons will past lying at the quay." Blitzstein'south translation, evocative though not literal, begins "And a send, a black freighter/With a skull on its masthead." The climactic high note falls on "transport" (exactly as it does in Brecht's German language). Feingold's translation is "And a l-gun galleon/With its viii sails a-waving." The language is far from idiomatic and the strongest annotation is on "fif," inappreciably the most of import or expressive syllable. One especially unsingable line in "The Barbara Song" goes "And if he knew he should treat a lady courteously." (I'thou not making this upwardly!)
The simply English version Lenya herself always chose to sing was the Blitzstein.
In this BLO production, it's very difficult to hear the words. Either the minor orchestra drowns out the singers, or diction goes down the drain in the attempt to sing Feingold's awkward English. Stage director Darrah has said he wants audiences to give their consummate attention to what's happening on stage, and so he refuses "distracting" super-titles. I'm glad BLO didn't resort to amplifying the singers. Merely what's the use of focusing on the stage business if you tin't follow the words? So very little in this revolutionary piece of work gets to brand much of an bear upon.
And I'd be most grateful if anyone can explain to me what happens at the very end when, instead of the "Moritat" returning with one of the well-nigh poignant passages in Brecht and Weill, Jenny starts to growl.
Remaining performances of "The Threepenny Opera" are at the Huntington Avenue Theatre on March 23, 24, and 25. Boston Lyric Opera ends its current flavour with 8 performances of Leonard Bernstein's curt satirical opera "Trouble in Tahiti" combined with his "Arias and Barcarolles" at the DCR Steriti Memorial Ice Rink in Boston from May 11-twenty.
Source: https://www.wbur.org/news/2018/03/22/threepenny-opera-boston-lyric