The Threepenny Opera

The last time The Threepenny Opera played Broadway, Cyndi Lauper was making her Broadway debut in it, and I somehow ended up at the unveiling of a portrait of her in the basement of some midtown restaurant attended by her and all of her castmates. I'm not going to say that night was the reason I haven't had a drink in several years, but if Ms. Lauper happened to remember a somewhat slurrily aggressive fan from that night, I would simply say that said fan is likely very apologetic (and still wonders what happened to the leather jacket he wore that night). Suffice to say, when I saw the actual production two weeks later, I watched through a sheen of humiliation that STILL wasn't sufficient enough to disguise how poorly conceived every single moment on that stage was.

Anyone who ever sat through a drama theory class knows that Brecht's goal with "Epic Theater" was for the audience not to identify with the action on stage in order to achieve some sort of catharsis but to remain distant enough to be critical of the action on stage. Which is simply to say that he wanted people to think more than they felt. But which many a lazy director has interpreted to mean you can throw whatever the fuck you want to at a Brecht play and excuse it as emotionally distancing. Who cares if a golden Pegasus and a messenger in hot pants doesn't make sense for the final scene, the director of the last revival must have asked. It's not SUPPOSED to make sense. It's Brecht!

Happily, the production of Threepenny that I caught at BAM recently (performed by Brecht's own theater troupe, the Berliner Ensemble) was directed by Robert Wilson with a singular vision that, while cold and detached, made perfect sense with the piece itself.

The story of criminal mastermind Mack the Knife, his friend and co-conspirator detective Tiger Brown, his young "wife" Polly, and the various denizens of underclass Victorian(-ish) London, it's a viciously cynical piece presented here in a style that crosses noir cinema with Weimar cabaret, grounding it in the time and place in which the piece was written, giving it a singular stylistic vision without resorting to gimmickry OR to realism. It helped that the piece was performed entirely in German (there's something I never thought I'd type). Okay, okay, there was one out of left field Lady Gaga reference, but it was so out of place that it almost felt like the director was winking at the terrible productions that have preceded his. I MIGHT be giving too much credit on that one, but what can you do?

I heard someone in the audience complaining that the cast had "the worst voices" they had ever heard which made me feel a little stabby because while not traditionally beautiful, each singer's voice seemed instead perfectly situated within their songs. They may not have made those songs sound lovely, but they're not lovely songs.

Apparently I knew this show better going in than I had realized because there were some noticeable cuts that I thought sacrificed a bit of clarity. And if you're going to do a three act show, you can't skip the first break and have intermission two hours and 15 minutes into the show, especially if the last act is only 40 minutes long. But those are quibbles. From the moment the cast first paraded across the stage to a tinny version of "Mack the Knife" to the deliriously absurd denouement, I was entranced. Threepenny is a disconcerting theatrical piece that still feels not only vital and relevant but brazen and experimental. It's not a joy to watch, but it's not supposed to be. And in the very confident, thoughtful hands of the Berliner Ensemble, it provided a slick, dark, funny, macabre beginning to the Halloween season (yes, I think that there's a Halloween season).