Jonathan Spencer and Catherine Cook as Mr. and Mrs. Peachum in the West Edge Opera production of The Threepenny Opera (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of West Edge Opera)
Yesterday afternoon at the Bridge Yard, West Edge Opera presented the second of three performances of The Threepenny Opera. In spite of its title, the author of the Wikipedia page for this work describes it (accurately) as a “play with music.” The text is by Bertolt Brecht, performed by West Edge in an English translation; and the music was composed for Brecht by Kurt Weill. It is worth noting that both author and composer appropriated earlier material for this project. The first song sung by Mr. Peachum (Jonathan Spencer) is set to the opening song from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, while Brecht injects (without credit) the texts of four ballads by François Villon.
An informative essay prepared for the West Edge Web site by Brian Rosen explains that, in producing performances of his plays, “Brecht imagined theatrical devices that would keep the audience disengaged or ‘alienated’.” Brecht believed that traditional staging techniques would distract the audience from the ideas that motivated his texts. A “disengaged” audience would be more likely to prioritize the ideas behind the text over the spectacle of presentation.
Ironically, the West Edge production, directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer, pushed this underlying principle to such an extreme that the rich images of “alienation” all but obliterated any trace of ideas for almost the entirety of the performance. It was only in the “choral anthem” that concluded the play, whose text was translated in such a way to call out the current problems of homelessness, that any vestige of an idea poked its way through all of the spectacle. Having seen many highly satisfying (and, true to the author, informative) productions of Brecht (and having played clarinet and saxophone for an arts camp production of Threepenny), I can say with some authority that no director I have encountered has missed the point of Brecht as thoroughly as Pulitzer.
The good news was that much of the musical experience was far more satisfying. Conductor David Möschler prepared a “pit band” of only seven players, which was entirely consistent with “Weill’s raw sound” (Möschler’s words from the program book). Möschler himself conducted from behind both piano and harmonium. Vocally, the leading roles of Macheath and Polly Peachum were both given solid delivery by Derek Chester and Maya Kherani, respectively. (The fact that I know Chester primarily from his performances with American Bach Soloists provided, at least for me, more “disengagement” than any of Pulitzer’s devices.) As could be expected, Catherine Cook stole the show with her interpretation of Mrs. Peachum (who actually delivers some of the heaviest “idea-laden” texts of the play).
Nevertheless, the production as a whole seemed too obsessed with alienation for its own sake to do very much justice to Brecht’s principles. Still, the spirit of appropriation, as exercised by both Weill and Brecht, seemed to be alive and well. The English text seems to have been taken from translations by Jeremy Sams (lyrics) and Robert MacDonald (dialog), prepared for a 1994 performance at Donmar Warehouse in London. Nevertheless, thanks to my own performance experience, I detected several clear appearances of the English text that Marc Blitzstein prepared for the famous Theater de Lys production in Greenwich Village in the Fifties. As the author of the aforementioned Wikipedia page puts it, Blitzstein “somewhat softened” Brecht’s words; but, under the shadow of those seeking out “un-American activities,” those were sensitive times. I was disappointed that Blitzstein’s name was omitted, leading me to wonder whether Donmar may have committed the same “sin of omission.”
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