Curtain Calls
George Heymont
myculturallandscape.com

While the streets of San Francisco may be filled with delightful vignettes, the streets of London have often teemed with danger. As far back as 1728, when John Gay wrote The Beggar's Opera, London was seething with financial disparity. Charles Dickens highlighted London's underworld in 1838's Oliver Twist. Stephen Sondheim's 1979 musical, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, focuses on a crazed assassin determined to take his vengeance on the privileged class.

In 1928, composer Kurt Weill teamed up with playwright Bertolt Brecht to create The Threepenny Opera as a way of criticizing the evils of capitalism. "Our aim was less to moralize than to observe," insisted Brecht. "We were not in fact speaking in the name of morality, but in that of the victims."

After the stock market crashed in 1929, Brecht published his Threepenny Novel (based on his play) in which he identified the villains as investment bankers who swindled ordinary citizens. One can easily see how The Threepenny Opera provided inspiration for modern day musicals like 1997's The Life and 2001's Urinetown.

Brecht liked to argue that the true criminals were the businessmen behind the banks, declaring that "The real estate business was no longer what it had been. New investments were scarce and the old properties had suffered terrible depreciation. What's a crowbar compared to a share certificate?"

Although it premiered in Berlin, The Threepenny Opera was set in Queen Victoria's London, where pimps and whores struggled to eke out a living while trying to outwit the police. The two rivals battling over who would control the future of pretty Polly Peachum were a brutally sadistic rapist and murderer named MacHeath (also known as Mack the Knife) and Polly's father, a sleazy entrepreneur who outfitted potential beggars with the costumes and props needed to ply their trade.

When MacHeath secretly marries Polly (who has only known him for five days), Peachum seeks revenge by trying to get MacHeath hanged. However, MacHeath's old army buddy, Tiger Brown, has become the Chief of Police. As a result, MacHeath usually manages to evade capture. Just when it looks like the executioner's noose will finally tighten around MacHeath's neck, a messenger from the Queen arrives to pardon the murderer and bestow upon him the title of Baron.

Over the years, The Threepenny Opera has been translated into 18 languages and received more than 10,000 performances. Composer Marc Blitzstein translated the piece into English for his famous 1956 off-Broadway production which, during its 2,707-performance run at the Theatre De Lys on Christopher Street, featured Weill's wife, Lotte Lenya, as Jenny; Bea Arthur as Lucy; Ed Asner as Mr. Peachum; Charlotte Rae as Mrs. Peachum; Jerry Stiller as Jake; and, at various times, Jerry Orbach as Smith, the Street Singer, and Mack the Knife.

A new production by Berkeley's Shotgun Players that was conceived by Susannah Martin (using the English translation of the play's dialogue by Robert MacDonald along with a recent translation of the lyrics by Jeremy Sams) updated the action to the 1970s. In the original version of The Threepenny Opera, Brecht included references to a 19th century coronation ceremony. For the Shotgun Players' production, those references were changed to mark the 25th anniversary Jubilee Celebration of England's Queen Elizabeth II in 1977. As Martin explains in her program notes:
"When Patrick Dooley and I began talking about this show a year ago, one of the first questions we asked ourselves was: How do we fully investigate the ideas in this play and invest in them in a way that is relevant to the culture and the world that we live in now? How do we tell the story and embrace all that is odd and contradictory about this play's structure and characters? As Brecht tells us: 'There is no business (however dirty) which, if one man turns it down, another won't jump at. One has to be prepared to stomach anything to make a decent living.' With a bit of distance we see how the past reflects the present.

I dug into both the cultural upheavals of Brecht's Berlin in the 1920s and America during the 1970s. In reaction to the social upheaval after World War I, Brecht and his contemporaries were interested in taking apart assumed structures and hierarchies in order to question and protect the faulty system that had been left behind.

People were reacting to similar issues then and now. The revolution of the 1960s felt like a total bust in the 1970s. Lots of good ideas had paved the way to self-indulgence with very little changing for minorities or the poor. The American economy was depressed. People were left picking up the pieces and feeling scammed. The bitterness that people felt about that led the way to a takeover by the right. This scenario is similar to Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Threepenny Opera is rife with broken expectation, contrast, and contradiction. That disjointedness is at the heart of what Brecht termed the alienation effect, but it is also the beating heart that drove the punk movement. The artists of the early punk movement in the 1970s picked up where Brecht left off. They were rebelling against the same failed ideas as the artists of Weimar Germany. Punk was a way of expressing anger and taking back power. The original punk artists, writers, musicians, and poets were Brechtian actors. They turned poverty into glorious art and the passion they felt in ripping something to shreds and putting it back together remains infectious and incredibly inspiring."

Most productions of The Threepenny Opera start slow and gain momentum as the tension builds between MacHeath and Mr. Peachum. The Shotgun Players' production benefitted immensely from the costume designs by Mark Koss and Nina Ball's grungy unit set. With musical direction by David Moschler (helming a punk band appropriately named "The Weillators"), Susannah Martin's staging kept anger and irony in full force throughout the evening.

The contrast between Jeff Wood's virile MacHeath, Danny Wolohan's inept Tiger Brown, and Dave Garrett's porcine Mr. Peachum (which bore a strange resemblance to Pastor Rick Warren) helped to underscore how much control men had (and often still do) over the women in their lives. Kelsey Venter (Polly), Beth Wilmurt (Jenny), and Rebecca Pingree (Lucy Brown) were dramatically and vocally strong while Bekka Fink (Mrs. Peachum), Andy Alabran (Filch), and Christopher W. White (Jake) helped round out the cast of lowlifes.

Finding a way to make a show that was edgy in 1928 relevant to an audience in 2009 (especially after 80+ years of societal change and the globalization of financial markets) is a difficult challenge. Martin and her creative team took the bull by the horns and wrestled it to the ground quite nicely. Aimed to shock its audience, this is the kind of show that needs to be seen by privileged people who have been sleepwalking through life.

The Threepenny Opera is defiantly rude, provocatively crude, and wonderfully lewd.

[ return to reviews ]