Review: Berliner Ensemble's Gone-in-a-Flash THREEPENNY OPERA Spends Long Weekend at BAM

Macheath’s back in town! Or at least he was for a few short days, when the Berliner Ensemble brought its now-famous Barrie Kosky production of THREEPENNY OPERA to BAM, in association with St. Ann’s Warehouse. 

You may know him better as “Mack the Knife” (“Die moritat von Mackie Messer”), from the song made famous in the US by Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darrin and Ella Fitzgerald, but this Mackie’s a different kettle of fish. He brings a harsher view of life--reflected in the overture’s nails-on-blackboards approach here--inhabiting a set by Rebecca Ringst (with lighting by Ulrich Eh, sound by Holger Schwank) that looks like a movable feast of monkey bars from your local playground.

With lyrics by Bertolt Brecht (yes, that one) and music by Kurt Weill, in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann, and dramaturg Sibylle Baschung for this production. It has a purposely shrill sound, via clever music director Adam Benzwi and a handful of musicians on a variety of instruments. That helps keep us from becoming too attached to any of the lowlifes that inhabit this world of bitter social commentary about the underbelly of the beggar business in London. (It is based on John Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera.”)

The program describes the piece as an “essentially trivial story about love, betrayal, business and morals” and people who are “more or less forced to keep their eyes on their own material advantage…and to look out for number one and, at the same time, to conceal this very fact….”

Opera? Well… Director Kosky calls Weill “as important for the history of music as Wagner.” DIE FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER it ain’t, but it’s not far from something cutting-edge that might show up at the annual PROTOTYPE Festival (Opera l Theatre l Now), which means, for me, “anything goes.”

My only complaint about this THREEPENNY is that because it’s delivered in German, us non-Deutschsprachige (non-German-speakers), spend too much time being distracted as we try to keep up with the story through title screens duplicated around the BAM Opera House to grab everything being thrown at us.

Thank God, Kosky has assembled a great cast of singing actors rather than acting singers that makes that complaint somewhat (but only somewhat) moot. Starting at the top, there’s Macheath (who’s introduced glamorously in that famous song, by Josefin Platt as “Moon Over Soho,” a new character, peeking out of the curtain), leader of a band of robbers and muggers, of Gabriel Schneider. He’s slight of build but looming in stature, tricking everyone, from wife and lover to those in the audience, about his intentions and games. He oozes attitude. (Watch out for that ending!)

But it’s hardly a one-man show, costumed splendidly by Dinah Ehm. The Peachums, who run the beggar business (“The Beggar’s Friend Ltd”) are in stellar form in their exploitation of other people’s better sides: Tilo Nest (Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, Mackie's rival and also serving as a kind of MC), Constanze Becker as Mrs. Peachum, a tough cookie herself) and Maeve Metelka as Polly, who is bedded and wedded to Mack, before showing she’s hardly an innocent.

Perhaps the show’s other better known song is “Pirate Jenny,” brought to popularity hereabouts by Nina Simone and Judy Collins (in very different ways, obviously!), but introduced and made famous back in 1928 when the show was first performed by Lotte Lenya. (She was Weill’s wife and muse.)

Here, while the song goes to Polly, there’s also a different Jenny (a whore), Bettina Hoppe, another first-rate performer, who seems to be the only one in the piece that has an inkling of a soul, even as she turns Macheath over to the police. Filling out the principals is Kathrin Wehlisch in drag as the Chief of Police Brown and Laura Balzer as his daughter Lucy, another of Macheath’s conquests.

The show goes full circle, reminding us that's the way of life, ending with “Moon Over Soho” in another verse of Mackie’s intro song. A sign up in lights says "LOVE ME"--as disingenuous as anything that came before.

Caption: Gabriel Schneider as Macheath, Nathan Plante on trumpet

Credit: Richard Termine/BAM

There isn’t a moment of music that’s a throwaway, which is Weill’s power as a composer. It all counts in bringing life to the characters that aren’t lovable for an instant but are dramatic in every instant. Dating from Germany’s Weimar era, the age of Sally Bowles and CABARET,…THREEPENNY OPERA makes that newer musical seem like a children’s story.