By Mike Hoban
Music by Kurt Weill; Libretto by Bertolt Brecht; English translation by Michael Feingold; Original German text based on Elisabeth Hauptmann’s German translation of John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera”. Directed by James Darrah; Music Direction by David Angus; Set Design by Julia Noulin-Mérat; Lighting Design by Pablo Santiago; and Costumes by Charles Neumann. Presented by the Boston Lyric Opera at the Huntington Avenue Theatre, 264 Huntington Avenue, Boston through March 25
Let me begin by saying that the sum total of my experience with opera is pretty much confined to multiple viewings of the Warner Bros. classic cartoon, What’s Opera Doc. But as a friend and colleague informed me when I told him at intermission that I had never seen an opera until now, he jokingly replied, “Well, you still haven’t.”
That being said, Boston Lyric Opera’s crossover production of The Threepenny Opera is still an awe-inspiring entertainment for theater goers, thanks largely to the vocal firepower of its talented cast of opera singers. It’s a marriage that succeeds for the most part, as director James Darrah mounts a broadly comic version of the classic – which sometimes seems to draw as much on the work of the Three Stooges and early John Waters as it does from traditional stagings of the Brecht/Weill/Hauptman masterpiece.
We get our first inkling that this may be a less than reverent production when Mrs. Peachum (an entertaining Michelle Trainor) comically bellows the traditional “shut off your cell phones and notice the exit signs” announcement with all the subtlety of a combat zone bartender shouting “last call” at a low rent strip joint, thus establishing the appropriate tone for the production.
Threepenny opens with the cast in hooded robes, facing diagonally away from the audience as Police Chief Tiger Brown (Daniel Belcher) sings the production’s signature tune, “Mack the Knife”. The song bears little resemblance to the swinging Bobby Darin cover, instead serving as a disturbing backdrop for Macheath’s systematic murder of the entire lot of them by mimed knife jabs or strangulation. It’s a gruesome but effective opening which poignantly conveys the seductive nature of evil spawned by institutionally generated and reinforced poverty.
The action begins in the “office” of the Sebastian Gorka-esqe Mr. Peachum (a wonderfully evil James Maddalena), who has anointed himself as a licensor of the City of London’s beggars. He and his wife are preparing their troops for the queen’s coronation, which is sure to be a bonanza his workers (from whom he takes a hefty cut), as well as the criminal elements led by Macheath. Much like a Dickens story, there is an overwhelming sense of despair that life in London is barely worth living, at least in an economic sense. Even the Peachums, who essentially rule the beggars, seem like they are struggling to make ends meet.
As they finish putting a new recruit through his humiliating paces, the Peachums realize that their daughter, the rebellious Polly, did not return home the night before. Deducing that she is with the arch criminal and womanizer Macheath, Mr. Peachum begins to plot to destroy the object of his daughter’s affections.
Meanwhile, an almost clinically deranged Polly (the marvelous soprano Kelly Kaduce) is off to wed her beau in a ceremony that only a biker gang could love. As they enter the abandoned warehouse where the nuptials are to take place, she tells him, “Mack, we really shouldn’t be beginning our new life together with a break in”. It’s the type of comic injection that defines the production, and while that hilarious line was a well-timed surprise, not all of the attempts at yucking up the story work as well. The newlyweds consummate their marriage, but it isn’t enough to keep Macheath from heading off to his favorite brothel, even when he discovers that he’s being set up for a takedown that even his old Army buddy, Tiger Brown, cannot save him from.
While the over-the-top comic direction of the production is a choice not everyone will appreciate (at one point it morphs into outright slapstick – complete with Polly and her nemesis Lucy actually smushing cake into one another’s faces), what does work brilliantly is the performances of the cast. As soon as Kaduce steps out of her punk-rock/borderline personality disorder brattiness and begins to sing, Polly is transformed into a three-dimensional character.
She brings down the house with her rendition of the blisteringly harsh “Pirate Jenny” at her wedding celebration, and she and Chelsea Basler (who plays Lucy) are a joy performing the “Jealousy Duet” as they rip each other to shreds before reaching an uneasy truce. Christopher Burchett has the requisite rakish charm for the role of Macheath (he reminds me of a young Mel Gibson), and excels in the role both dramatically and musically. Sultry mezzo-soprano Renée Tatum has an almost regal presence in the role of Jenny, and her performance of “Solomon Song” is breathtaking. The cast is uniformly strong and the ensemble pieces have all the power and grandeur that I had anticipated hearing from a professional opera company.
The BLO should be applauded for their weirdly imaginative production as well as their willingness to cross over to mainstream theater, and I eagerly await their next production – two Leonard Bernstein works – Trouble in Tahiti and Arias & Barcarolles – that have been combined into “one harmonious piece about marriage, dreams, and disillusionment”. (May 11-20 at DCR Steriti Memorial Rink in Boston’s North End). For more info, go to: https://blo.org/
