The Threepenny Opera
2006 Roundabout Theater Company Revival

Threepenny Opera: Debauchery, Updated

April 15, 2006
JEFF LUNDEN | www.npr.org/
Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday

In 1928, playwright Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill were at the cutting edge of German theater. Their adaptation of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera -- which they retitled The Threepenny Opera -- was a major sensation.

Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper play Macheath and Jenny, respectively, in The Threepenny Opera
Image credit:Joan Marcus

The highly political show, set in 18th-century London, was populated with a nasty assortment of thieves, cut-throats, beggars, prostitutes and capitalists. Now, a Broadway revival directed by Scott Elliot untethers The Threepenny Opera from its period setting and puts it into a kind of metaphorical present. Playwright and actor Wallace Shawn adapted Brecht's script for the Roundabout Theatre's production, using coarser language than previous translations; the venue is Manhattan's Studio 54.

Many of the cast members of this gender-bending production wear S&M bondage costumes designed by Isaac Mizrahi, and the spare set uses large neon signs to identify locales: a stable, whorehouse, the gallows. Elliot calls it a "theatrical urban landscape."

That landscape is inhabited by an array of artists from wildly differing backgrounds, from theater veterans such as Jim Dale to pop star Cyndi Lauper and Saturday Night Livealum Ana Gasteyer. Performance artists and drag queens appear in some of the smaller roles.

'Threepenny Opera' Brings Renewed Decadence to Studio 54

By BEN BRANTLEYAPRIL 21, 2006 | www.nytimes.com/

AND you thought those crazy, hazy nights when Studio 54 sizzled were strictly a thing of the past. Think again, disco boys and girls. Why right now -- on the very spot where Halston, Liza, Bianca and Andy once held sybaritic court -- you can watch the same kinds of revels they might have witnessed in the 1970's, thanks to the shrill, numbing revival of "The Threepenny Opera" that opened at the theater at Studio 54 last night.

Cross-dressed men and women in writhing sexual pretzels; leather boys and glitter queens vacuuming up piles of snow with their nostrils; strobe lights, neon lights and, yes, disco-ball lights. There's even a bare-chested hunk in a gold lamé bathing suit who arrives on a flying golden horse, summoning sweet memories of that fab birthday party for Bianca. (Or was it Liz?) All of this is once again on tap via the Roundabout Theater Company.

There's one big difference: nobody in the current incarnation of those days of swine and poses seems to be having any fun. This is one party where the hangover begins almost as soon as the evening does.

Almost two and a half years after the Roundabout's canny cash cow of a revival of "Cabaret" closed at Studio 54 (after more than five years in residence), the company is again inviting theatergoers to come to the cabaret, old chum. This time the occasion is Scott Elliott's production of the 1928 show that made musicals like "Cabaret" and "Chicago" possible: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "Threepenny Opera" is the granddaddy of all the singing, stinging portraits of fat societies on their eves of destruction.

Mr. Elliott has even recruited one of the stars of the Roundabout "Cabaret," Alan Cumming, who won a Tony playing the ghoulish M.C. in the Kander-Ebb musical and who here portrays the murdering, whoring, stealing Macheath (Mac the Knife), the prince of thieves in stinking, corrupt London. But while it raises the kink quotient even higher than "Cabaret" did, this production has nothing like the same sustained point of view that might hook and hypnotize audiences. With Mr. Elliott overseeing a cast jam-packed with misused talent (including the pop stars Cyndi Lauper and Nellie McKay), this "Threepenny" takes Brecht's notion of the theater of alienation to new self-defeating extremes.

Created in the era in which "Cabaret" was set, "The Threepenny Opera" remains the most famous and popular example of what Brecht called "epic theater." Inspired by John Gay's rollicking "Beggar's Opera" (1728), "Threepenny" translated the tale of the villainous but irresistible Macheath and his marauders into the age of Queen Victoria. But the show's real satiric targets were the middle classes of poverty-crippled, rudderless Germany in the 1920's.

Using deliberately artificial techniques -- painted signs, scene-setting titles, spoken asides and musical-hall songs that often had little to do with the immediate plot -- the play was designed to sustain an intellectual distance, to allow audiences to see their own reflections in vicious thugs, whores, beggars and policemen motivated by the same primal needs and instincts as themselves. The music, Brecht wrote, was meant to become "an active collaborator in the stripping bare of the middle-class corpus of ideas."

An immediate, scandalous hit in Europe, "Threepenny" failed to generate the same frissons when it first arrived in New York in 1933. Writing of its Broadway premiere in The New York Times, Lewis Nichols described it as "a gently mad evening in the theater for those who like their spades in the usual nomenclature of the earnest." It wasn't until the fabled Off Broadway revival at the Theater de Lys in 1954 -- with Weill's widow, Lotte Lenya, as the prostitute Jenny -- that "Threepenny" achieved popular success in Manhattan.

That production used a translation by Marc Blitzstein that is probably still the best-known English version but is regarded by purists as a softened and sanitized interpretation. Certainly no such complaints can be lodged against the new translation by the playwright Wallace Shawn, whose rendering is both more densely lyrical (with some cumbersome poetic tropes in the songs) and explicitly obscene than any I know. This is a show that doesn't hesitate to call sexual organs and acts by their most common names, loudly and repeatedly.

In the same spirit Mr. Elliott has chosen to make full use of a freedom from censorship that Brecht could only have envied. So in this version Macheath's love interests include not only the usual component of female whores (most notably Ms. Lauper as Jenny), but also their male counterparts.

Macheath again finds himself torn between two brides: the demi-virginal Polly Peachum (Ms. McKay) and Lucy Brown (Brian Charles Rooney). But in this case Lucy is a man, who makes a point of showing the audience exactly what lies beneath his skirt. Macheath's friendship with Tiger Brown (Christopher Innvar), Lucy's father and the chief of police, is of the crotch-grabbing, kissing kind. And for a copulatory free-for-all brothel sequence, the participants' underwear glows luridly beneath a black light. (Jason Lyons did the lighting, which allows for Brechtian signage to be writ in neon and L.C.D. supertitles.)

Isaac Mizrahi created the costumes here, in a smorgasbord of salacious styles, from a cleavage-flashing Chanel-style suit to the "Blue Angel"-style chanteuse get-ups worn by Ms. Lauper. Most of the clothes, plucked from racks on Derek McLane's naked it's-only-a-play set, suggest that their wearers have just come from frolicking in the back room of a leather bar. This includes Mr. Cumming's Macheath, who trades in the character's usual gentlemanly suit and bowler for a punkish ensemble and a Mohawk.

The performances are just as widely varied and as bereft of character-defining purpose. Everything seems done for isolated shock effect, without any regard to how one stylistic component might relate to another, so it's impossible to intuit exactly what society is being skewered.

Looking like Dietrich and sounding like a Brooklyn Piaf, Ms. Lauper delivers Jenny's ballads with teary, soulful intensity. She also leads, in Lenya-like style, the show's famous prologue, "Song of the Extraordinary Crimes of Mac the Knife." That marvelous trouper Jim Dale plays Mr. Peachum, Polly's father and the head of a vast network of beggars, in the seedy music-hall style of Laurence Olivier in "The Entertainer." As his wife, Ana Gasteyer talks like a shrill Scarsdale matron and sings penetratingly in a voice of a hundred trumpets.

Mr. Cumming brings much conviction and agony to Macheath's songs of the oppressed in the prison and hanging scenes. But there's little sense of the menacing charisma that keeps all of London atremble.

Ms. McKay, the inventive and seriously talented young singer-songwriter ("Get Away From Me"), comes closest to achieving a Brechtian effect. Clad in trailing pre-Raphaelite bridal white, her Polly speaks and sings with a flat, deadpan sincerity that suggests sugary blandness can accommodate a multitude of sins. It's a brave, carefully thought-out performance, though its willful affectlessness means that songs like "Pirate Jenny" (restored to Polly here, as in the original version) have no chance of being showstoppers.

The only songs delivered at full throttle are those that tell the audience members how rotten they are: "Certain Things Make Our Life Impossible," "How Do Humans Live?," "Cry From the Grave." But in presenting Brecht's lowlifes as exotic, feckless party animals instead of as pseudo-bourgeois materialists, Mr. Elliott keeps these characters at more of a distance from us than Brecht surely ever intended. Their censoriousness registers as just a random dip in a pharmaceutically induced roller coaster of moods. Another line of cocaine or two, and these hedonists will forget all about the poor and hungry.

The Threepenny Opera

By Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. In a new translation by Wallace Shawn, based on Elisabeth Hauptmann's German translation of John Gay's "Beggar's Opera." Directed by Scott Elliott; music director, Kevin Stites; choreographed by Aszure Barton. Sets by Derek McLane; costumes by Isaac Mizrahi; lighting by Jason Lyons; sound by Ken Travis; hair and wig design by Paul Huntley; original orchestrations, Mr. Weill; music coordinator, John Miller; production stage manger, Peter Hanson; technical supervisor, Steve Beers; general manager, Sydney Beers; associate artistic director, Scott Ellis. Presented by the Roundabout Theater Company, Todd Haimes, artistic director; Harold Wolpert, managing director; Julia C. Levy, executive director. At Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, (212) 719-1300. Through June 18. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.

WITH: Alan Cumming (Macheath), Jim Dale (Mr. Peachum), Ana Gasteyer (Mrs. Peachum), Cyndi Lauper (Jenny), Nellie McKay (Polly Peachum), Christopher Innvar (Tiger Brown), Carlos Leon (Filch) and Brian Charles Rooney (Lucy Brown).

Mack is Back as Threepenny Opera with Cumming, Lauper and Co. Opens on Broadway

BY ERNIO HERNANDEZ | www.playbill.com
APR 20, 2006

Alan Cumming returns to Broadway as "Mack the Knife" opposite Cyndi Lauper, Ana Gasteyer, Nellie McKay and Jim Dale in the Roundabout Theatre Company revival of The Threepenny Opera which opens April 20.
 

Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper in The Threepenny Opera. Joan Marcus

Scott Elliott (Hurlyburly, The Women) directs the world premiere translation, adapted by Wallace Shawn. The show began previews March 24 at Studio 54 for a limited run through June 18. Aszure Barton choreographs.

A mohawked Alan Cumming (Cabaret, Design for Living) stars as the infamous Macheath opposite pop songstress Cyndi Lauper (as Jenny) and fellow recording artist Nellie McKay (Polly) with stage veterans Ana Gasteyer (Wicked, The Rocky Horror Show) and Tony Award winner Jim Dale (Barnum, Joe Egg) (as Mrs. and Mr. Peachum) in the work based on the original Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill classic musical Die Dreigroschenoper.

Set in London in the 1800s, the The Threepenny Opera concerns a notorious bandit who marries a girl, much to the chagrin of her father. The peeved patriarch does everything in his power to imprison his son-in-law in this political and social satire. Director Elliott stages the two-act scene-and-song show with a nod to Brecht's signature style. (Shawn can be heard in voiceover.)

Elliott posed "I think, ultimately, it's always ripe for revival because the message of Threepenny Opera is severe; it's about the corruption of humanity and how men can consume other men. One of the lines in the play is 'The world hasn't changed' and that's from when? And now, don't we still say that?" (For more from the director and cast members, read Playbill.com's feature "Ripe for Revival: Creators and Cast of Threepenny Opera Make the Musical Modern".)

"I tried to get a cross section of humanity really," director Elliott explained to Playbill.com. "In this instance, because they have to sing and dance and act, it's kind of like the cross section of the entertainment community. So it's a very diverse group of people." Also in the The Threepenny Opera cast are Christopher Innvar (Les Miserables) as Tiger Brown, Carlos Leon (Aunt Dan and Lemon) as Filtch and Brian Charles Rooney (The Ballad of Bonnie & Clyde) as Lucy. The ensemble features Adam Alexi-Malle, Terry Burrell, Brian Butterick, David Cale, Romain Frugé, John Herrera, Nehal Joshi, Christopher Kenney, Maureen Moore, Brooke Sunny Moriber, Deborah Lew, Valisia Lekae Little, Kevin Rennard and Lucas Steele.

The design team for The Threepenny Opera features Derek McLane (sets), Isaac Mizrahi (costumes), Jason Lyons (lights) and Ken Travis (sound). Kevin Stites serves as the music director.

Fashion personality Mizrahi previously collaborated with director Elliott on the Roundabout's revival of The Women for his Broadway debut. He also joins the stage director for the Broadway revival of Barefoot in the Park.

Roundabout had previously announced the work in June 2003 for the 2004-2005 season, but later bumped it from the lineup. The Brecht-Weill work will again see the Broadway stage for the first time since 1989 when former "The Police" frontman Sting starred in 3 Penny Opera.

Actor-playwright Shawn last appeared on stage in Elliott's Off Broadway staging of David Rabe's Hurylyburly. He is known for his turns in the films "My Dinner With Andre," "The Princess Bride" and as the voice of Rex in the "Toy Story" movies. As a playwright, Shawn's works include Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Designated Mourner and Marie and Bruce. His screen adaptation of the latter, starring Matthew Broderick, is forthcoming.

Founding artistic director of Off-Broadway's The New Group, Elliott directed the current Broadway revival of Barefoot in the Park, Shawn's Aunt Dan and Lemon for his company and the 2001 Broadway revival of The Women for Roundabout. Other credits include Three Sisters, Present Laughter, Kiki & Herb: A Coup de Theatre, The Women of Lockerbie, Comedians and Smelling a Rat. A one time performer, he appeared on Broadway in Les Miserables and Ain't Broadway Grand.

Tickets to The Threepenny Opera at Broadway's Studio 54, located at 254 West 54th St., are available by calling Roundabout Ticket Services at (212) 719-1300 or online at www.roundabouttheatre.org.

By DAVID ROONEY | https://variety.com/
APRIL 20, 2006

Timing is everything. While any time is the right time for "The Threepenny Opera," the enterprise has been trumped by Broadway's riveting reinvention of "Sweeney Todd." Even without the stiff competition, the landmark musical would be a botched job this time around, directed and adapted with sledgehammer subtlety by Scott Elliott and Wallace Shawn, respectively.

With: Macheath - Alan Cumming Mr. Peachum - Jim Dale Mrs. Peachum - Ana Gasteyer Jenny - Cyndi Lauper Polly Peachum - Nellie McKay Tiger Brown - Christopher Innvar Filch - Carlos Leon Lucy Brown - Brian Charles Rooney

Given that it clobbers you over the head with surfaced subtext for nearly three hours, the show should come with a migraine warning. Elliott has taken his cue from the decadent past of the Studio 54 venue, piling on enough gutter glamour and chic perversion to animate a whole summer of gay circuit parties, plus a touring company or two of “The Rocky Horror Show.”

The deeply misguided, disco-dancing finale — with a muscle-boy royal messenger descending in gold hot pants and glitter boots on a neon horse to liberate Macheath — might tickle the coke-addled ghosts haunting the legendary temple of debauchery. But it won’t soothe the spirit of Bertolt Brecht.

The fundamental flaw here is that the material itself becomes secondary to the director’s imprint on it. In Brecht’s anticapitalist play — as in John Gay’s 18th-century “The Beggar’s Opera,” on which it was based — the distinctions are blurred between bourgeois society, with its corrupt, wealthy power brokers, and the criminal underworld of pimps, whores, cut-throats and thieves. Elliott blunts the satire by stridently accentuating the low-life depravity while neglecting to summon any real menace.

Some of the staging is effective. The “beggars” enter from the audience onto a naked stage, plucking costumes from racks and applying makeup during the overture. Jenny (Cyndi Lauper), the prostitute former lover of outlaw Macheath (Alan Cumming), begins the “Moritat” (here titled “Song of the Extraordinary Crimes of Mac the Knife”) unaccompanied, before being joined by the ensemble in a gruesome kickline under a jumble of multicolored neon identifying the play’s locations.

But things get bogged down immediately thereafter with the book scenes, which generally are flat and tedious. Shawn’s jokey adaptation trivializes the play into a lurid burlesque without texture, alternating moments of vaudeville and British music hall with sketch comedy and belabored illustrations of current relevance.

Warmongering gets a look in with a sing-along “Army Song” in which “new recruits learn to hate different cultures”; the recasting as a transvestite of Lucy Brown (Brian Charles Rooney), bisexual bigamist Macheath’s secret bride, allows for a nod to gay marriage; and, worst of all, consumer culture is ham-handedly lampooned in “The Ballad of the Happy Life,” when Macheath is joined by a chorus emblazoned with corporate brand names. Trailing them is that mascot of greed, Mrs. Peachum (Ana Gasteyer), here trussed up in a tarty faux-Chanel suit and Ivana Trump hairdo.

Shawn’s vulgarized lyrics (it becomes numbingly predictable that “China” will be rhymed with “vagina,” and “pluck” will beget “fuck”) lack the poetry and storytelling flow of, say, Marc Blitzstein’s translation. As always, Weill’s dissonant score remains the show’s chief enticement; the composer’s original orchestrations are vigorously played by a 10-member ensemble led by music director Kevin Stites.

Vocally, too, “Threepenny” is well served. Stepping in after Edie Falco dropped out due to “Sopranos” commitments, Lauper betrays a hint of impersonation in her Weimar warbling, but the pop diva knows how to command an audience in a song, which makes up for her slightly stiff acting. Her lovely, rueful take on “Solomon Song” benefits enormously from the simple staging. Likewise her betrayal tango with Macheath, “The Ballad of the Pimp,” one of the few places where Aszure Barton’s Fosse-macabre choreography doesn’t look mannered.

The Mohawk-coiffed Cumming can play sinister, lewd charm in his sleep, and the inevitable comparisons with his thrilling Emcee turn in “Cabaret” on the same stage a few years back make his casting less interesting. He too readily indulges the production’s tendency toward crotch-thrusting excess, so there’s nothing chilling about his winking Macheath as he courts the audience’s complicity. Cumming is best in back-to-back numbers near the close of the show, summoning bitter intensity when his survival is threatened in “Call From the Grave” and “The Ballad in Which Macheath Asks Everyone’s Forgiveness.”

Jim Dale brings wily vaudevillian humor to the unscrupulous Mr. Peachum, particularly in the jaunty “Song of Inadequacy of Human Striving.” As his venal wife, Gasteyer’s powerhouse pipes, coupled with her shrill comic characterization, become a little wearing. Doing distaff duty with smirking aplomb, Rooney displays a fine soprano on “The Jealousy Duet” and “Lucy’s Aria,” sung in German.The real surprise is singer-songwriter Nellie McKay, a genuinely odd and appealing stage presence who seems to have time-traveled in from another era. Dressed in dusty, corpse-bride white, and with her fresh-faced looks, dreamy eccentricity and sing-song dialogue delivery, McKay is an arresting match for Macheath’s young wife, Polly Peachum. She gets the balance of naivety and cunning just right, and her savvy spin on “Pirate Jenny” and “The ‘No’ Song” places them among the production’s better numbers.

Costumer Isaac Mizrahi appears to be channeling Vivienne Westwood with a dash of Versace. But the outre goth/punk fetishism of the outfits (Carlos Leon’s platform thigh boots and vinyl microshorts being the most over the top) feels more like an attention-grabbing Halloween dress-up stunt than a seriously subversive interpretation of the material. That flash-trash aspect pretty much echoes Elliott’s skin-deep investigation overall.

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The Threepenny Opera

Studio 54; 1,007 seats; $111.25 top

PRODUCTION: A Roundabout Theater Company presentation of a musical in two acts with book and lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, music by Kurt Weill, based on Elisabeth Hauptmann's German translation of John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera." English translation by Wallace Shawn. Directed by Scott Elliott. Music director, Kevin Stites. Choreography, Aszure Barton.

CREATIVE: Sets, Derek McLane; costumes, Isaac Mizrahi; lighting, Jason Lyons; sound, Ken Travis; hair and wigs, Paul Huntley; orchestrations, Weill; music coordinator, John Miller; production stage manager, Peter Hanson. Opened April 20, 2006. Reviewed April 14. Running time: 2 HOURS, 45 MIN.