Broadway Watch - The Threepenny Opera

The Threepenny Opera Music by Kurt Weill, Book & Lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, Translated from the German by Wallace Shawn; Based on Elisabeth Hauptmann’s translation of John Gay’s The Beggars Opera. Directed by Scott Elliott At Studio 54 Opened 20th April 2006 Extracts from various reviewers: “Alienation? What alienation? “Okay, there's the voice over the P.A. system calling the actors to their places. And the actors marching up the aisles to the stage to get there. And one performer informing the audience about the impending intermission. And, yes, there's no curtain call. And... well, the examples do go on. But isn't it amazing how these things, in the proper context, can invigorate rather than distance? “The Bertolt Brecht purists probably just fainted. "The very idea," you can hear the weakened stragglers whispering with their little remaining breath, "of director Scott Elliott, in the Roundabout's new revival of The Threepenny Opera at Studio 54, exploiting and exploding Brecht's theatrical tenets in this way. How dare he! Doesn't he know Brecht is sacred?" “Of course he does. He also knows that Brecht is dead. “And both factors, it turns out, are equally important in Elliott's supremely stylish Threepenny resuscitation. So if you're going to take umbrage to any new calculation, or (worse yet!) a new translation (by actor-playwright Wallace Shawn), of Brecht's original German play, you might as well stay home. This Threepenny is not for you. It is, however, for everyone else.” “That Elliott could assemble such disparate performers and integrate them into his Threepenny with no hint of incongruity… ought to qualify him as the Broadway season's preeminent miracle worker… All while respecting and - dare I say it? - doing justice to the material. “They get in a few (specific) digs at American corporatism; they get in a few (less specific) digs at the Bush administration and associated cash-hungry conservatives. But they never operate outside the text, never force their ideas into a structure not designed to support them. Shawn's new translation might be especially brisk and more than a little coarse, but it's always Threepenny, simply one reconsidered for today.” “However, it must be stated - and some might consider this a flaw - that the production packs all the emotional punch of doing laundry… while some cast members, particularly Lauper and McKay, cut arresting forms onstage and knock out the songs like natural-born interpreters… their characterizations are otherwise most charitably described as approximate.” “But what really matters is how much of Brecht truly emerges from this production. Elliott and his company have grippingly postulated what Brecht himself might have created were he still alive and revisiting his own work: They've made alterations of material and tone that nonetheless leave the spirit of the original firmly intact. That alone makes this Threepenny Opera far and away the least alienating, and most successful, musical revival of the season.” Talkin’ Broadway – Matthew Murray “Scott Elliott's production… might be considered a performance art/cabaret combo, since the musical's songs are presented as if in a nightclub setting despite the presence of some set pieces and blaring neon signs provided by Derek McLane.” “…Threepenny may now work best as a song cycle. As a play with music, it certainly doesn't hum along like a new BMW in this presentation -- and I'm going to attribute the problem to both the late book writer and the very much alive and busy director. True, Elliott gets thing off to a fab start: Most of the 20 actors enter through the auditorium and take the stage, where they shed their outerwear to display an array of costumer Isaac Mizrahi's skimpy innerwear. After putting finishing touches on each other's make-up, they assume accusatory expressions and face the audience in solid ranks. Immediately, Cyndi Lauper begins singing "Mack the Knife." The others then deliver solos until all of them are lined up downstage. Aha, I thought; this is how Brecht would have liked it!” “From there on, however, the sizzle fizzles. Book scene after book scene fails to be mordantly amusing, and the unsparing Brecht-Weill proclamation that there's no honor among thieves feels clumsy in the telling.” “Clearly, what Elliott wanted was a 2006 version of Threepenny that would be equivalent in shock value to Brecht's 1928 script. Shawn keeps the obscenities popping like kernels of corn in a microwave oven, but in these permissive times, they are far from shocking. The dialogue and lyrics, although conscientious, are prosaic -- but not in the deliberately unpolished manner in which Brecht wrote his didactic, stirring anthems about man's inhumanity to man.” “Lauper wins the "Why Haven't You Been on Broadway Before?" award. With her trademark concert delivery intact, she nails the opening threnody and later does a wounded "Solomon Song" that even Lotte Lenya would have applauded.” “If anyone comes close to stealing the show, it's Brian Charles Rooney, who turns up in drag and sings a pure-falsetto "Lucy's Aria" in German and English. Bravo to him… And Cumming? …it's somewhat mitigating to watch him play this character on the same stage where he played the insinuating emcee in Cabaret. He looked emaciated back then and now is buffed up, but that's the only big difference.” “Though Cumming's performance has its highlights, as do so many of the others, I can't wholeheartedly recommend the production.” Theater Mania – David Finkle “Ouch! Broadway's new Threepenny Opera hurts—the eyes, the brain, and, at close to three hours, the ass. It's not so hard on the ears, as music director Kevin Stites makes Kurt Weill's prickly neo-classical score glitter and glare. But director Scott Elliott… has turned Bertolt Brecht's 1928 play, about petit-bourgeois capitalists whose trades happen to be murder, fraud, and prostitution, into a dull hodgepodge of unfunny comedy sketches…” “Really, it shouldn't be so hard to make Brechtian detachment work on Broadway. Many of the late German playwright's infamous "distancing" techniques, in which seams are exposed and actors present as well as inhabit their characters, are now the stuff of mainstream stagecraft, from Rent to Chicago… But this Threepenny isn't just delivered with neon-sign quotation marks… Elliott's production is nothing but a series of quotation marks—presentation ideas minus any compelling notion of what's being presented, how the ideas might fit together or spark some illuminating friction from their contrast.” “The way the show handles its one chart-topping hit, the opening number about the notorious cutthroat Mac the Knife, inspires some hope: The first few verses are delivered a cappella by Cyndi Lauper, whose crackling rasp of a voice, not to mention her heavy eyeshadow, seem a perfect fit for the world-weary Brecht/Weill milieu. After trading off subsequent verses, the entire reaches a chilling anti-climax with a silent, dispirited kick line. Later full-cast chorales, delivered stock-still from platforms in Jason Lyons' oven-baking lights, pack some of the intended punch. “Little else here does… Cumming's Macheath, who seems less dashing than ashen, comes off like a compendium of musty collegiate notions of nose-thumbing provocation, from the sexual to the sartorial.” “Nobody onstage seems to belong in the same play, decade or continent… the motley cast of would-be misfits and miscreants… are given precious little to wear by Mizrahi and still less to do by choreographer Aszure Barton.” Broadway.Com – William Stevenson Next Broadway Musical opening – Lestat – 25th April