Review: Brecht’s Threepenny Opera Comes to BAM in a Strange and Inventive New Production

Kurt Weill has been having a moment in New York. An Encores! revival of the composer’s long-neglected Love Life reminded us of his often-gorgeous score, and the Berliner Ensemble’s four-performance residency at BAM performing The Threepenny Opera, a co-presentation with St. Ann’s Warehouse, showcases his most celebrated work in a cheerily chaotic new take.

This Brooklyn stint marks the New York arrival of Australian director Barrie Kosky, a top dog in European opera and musical theater. For audiences dissatisfied with the hit-or-miss directorial interventions of auteurs like Jamie Lloyd or Ivo van Hove, Kosky’s work here may be an exception. The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 in German (as it is in this production, with English supertitles), is a distinctly weird piece of musical theater, so the strangeness of the production seems like a match for the material.

In adapting John Gay’s 18th-century play, The Beggar’s Opera, librettist Bertolt Brecht and composer Weill faithfully preserved the story of prolific criminal Macheath (Gabriel Schneider) and his attempts to avoid arrest amid the seedy background of London’s thieves, prostitutes, and corrupt police. Brecht and Weill infused the tale with their fiercely anti-capitalist perspectives, the metatheatrical and defamiliarizing tools of Brecht’s theater practices, and, most scorchingly, a stunning and dissonant score that melds jazz and Klezmer and the sounds of German street music.

The brittle socialist politics of Brecht’s storytelling don’t, for the most part, feel illuminated by Kosky’s playful approach. Instead, what’s highlighted is the classification-defying structure that makes The Threepenny Opera such a singular piece. The songs disrupt the action more often than they erupt out of the scene’s emotion, so it can sometimes feel as if characters are stepping outside of the dialogue to comment musically on their own behaviors.

Because of that, Threepenny’s characters function less as individual figures following their own arcs than as a united, many-headed mouthpiece of a single perspective declaiming that “Man stays alive thanks to how completely he can repress his own humanity.” These musical injections hit harder here when they’re personal—like the electric “Tango-Ballad” in which Macheath and his streetwalking lover Jenny (Bettina Hoppe) recount their cozily checkered past together—than when they’re political, like the various odes to mankind’s basest instincts.

Kosky’s staging follows simultaneous maximalist and minimalist impulses. The cast spends much of the first act clambering over a geometric jungle gym of boxed-in stairs and platforms inscribed in a series of hulking pillars. All that climbing never gets repetitive: Kosky finds infinite variety in Rebecca Ringst’s set, as the vertical landscape multiplies the number of stage pictures that the cast can form. Polly (Maeve Metelka) sings “Pirate Jenny” framed inside a box, both celebrated and trapped. Ulrich Eh’s pinpointed lighting casts bodies in the background into striking silhouette, accenting the featured performers in each new tableau.

This is also a sort of über-version of Threepenny, the production incorporating Brecht’s later additions to the text, songs that were cut from the premiere, and some patches of contemporary comic improvisations (occasionally unsubtitled, which renders them, unfortunately, meaningless to the non-German speaker). That’s a lot of show, maybe too much, and the ballad-heavy second act can drag, the early ebullience replaced by something less gripping.

But there’s a small-scale intimacy to much of this production, too, especially in the quiet intensity of Hoppe’s mournful Jenny, who counters Schneider’s Macheath’s writhing exuberance. Much of the action is effectively simple, and most of the costumes gently modern but unobtrusive. The cast is small (Macheath doubles as a beggar in the opening dialogue), eschewing the show’s usual large ensemble: as a result, the show seems to take place in the theater itself, the actual audience more present to the characters than the imagined alleyways and brothel. If I couldn’t tell you precisely what Kosky’s staging vision means, I can tell you what it does, at least most of the time: it rivets, in the assured idiosyncrasies that mirror those in the writing.

It’s a staging that does justice to Weill’s music by capturing its strange, sharp edges and celebratory dissonant flashes visually. Adam Benzwi leads the seven-piece band, with Weill’s eclectic orchestrations and extensive doubling (two winds players cover seven instruments between them), with expressive precision. And if Jenny’s wordless wail, a sort of waifish lament that concludes Hoppe’s haunting rendition of “Solomon Song,” is a new invention here, as it seems to be, it fits: a small respite from Brecht’s fervent alienation of the audience to allow Weill’s strange, taut melody to break their hearts.