Die Dreigroschenoper

My whole life I've wanted to see the Berliner Ensemble. I have been in the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm (big statue of Brecht in the park in front of it- you can't miss it), but they were on vacation for the summer. I had waited many years to see the Moscow Art Theatre as well, and when I saw their Three Sisters at BAM ten year ago I was bitterly disappointed. It was so bad, if it hadn't been the Moscow Art Theatre, I would've left at intermission.
But Friday night I was not disappointed in the Berliner Ensemble's Threepenny Opera directed by Robert Wilson. I wish I'd known when I bought the tickets online that the translation of "partial view" was "you are sitting so far house left, you and your boyfriend will be able to seen none of the three supertitle screens." It wasn't such a big deal for me, but it was for Tom, at over 3 hours. He bore it very graciously.
Other than a weird costume choice for MacHeath (a 70s-like black lounge suit that sparkled) and a poor directorial choice in Act 3 (the scene in the whorehouse was truly endless and nothing happened), it was wonderful. Unlike the last Wilson-directed play I saw (Woyzeck), the design elements a music fed the action, they didn't stop it dead. It was not quickly paced- the first two acts were three hours, but it held together as a whole.
The actors were extraordinary- completely committed in every way. And it was so refreshing to see actors in a musical who looked like people, not models. Particularly good were Stefan Kurt as Macheath, Juergen Holtz and Traute Hoess as the Peachums, Stefanie Stappenback as Polly and Angela Winkler as Jenny (she played Oskar's mother in The Tin Drum).
The other astonishing thing about this production was the music. I know the score very well- I can sing Blitzstein's or Mannheim's translations (or both) of every single song. But somehow with these voices and the musical director of Hans-Joern Brandenburg and Stefan Rager, every song was like you'd never heard it before. Charles Isherwood's review didn't exaggerate at all.
The photos are by Sarah Krulwich for the New York Times. Link to Charles Isherwood's review above.

Lost in the Stars

On Friday night, a group of musician friends and I went to see Kurt Weill & Maxwell Anderson's Lost in the Stars at City Center Encores. One friend told me her dad had recently told her that singers aren't really musicians, and I told her my father would have said the same, if he hasn't already. He takes a dim view of musicians as true appreciators of music; he warned me against studying too much, because it would make music seem too much like work. I took There was one composer among us, and the rest were singers. But I studied theory in college and I'm still singing, so I think I'm unscathed.
In my youth, I'd listened to my parents' original cast recording, and I'd had a really hard time with it. The choral music just seemed wrong in a Broadway musical. Of course, Weill was doing just that- he was trying to do something different. There were only two songs that stuck with me- the title number and The Little Grey House.
I loved the chance to see even a truncated version of it. And it surprised me that however mediocre some of Anderson's (never think of him as a lyricist, do you?) lyrics are, the music is so engulfing the songs work in spite of the words.
There was a snarky review of Lost in the Stars in the Times on Saturday, where Mr. Isherwood took great umbrage at the libretto. In my experience, no one goes to Encores to revisit an old book. Besides, there's no way to be sure what is Anderson's original, and what's David Ives' rewrite (I've always envied him that rewrite job- must be a lot of fun). The novel that the libretto is based on (Cry, the Beloved County by Alan Paton; I had to read it in high school and it was rough going) was written by a white South African, Anderson was a white America, and Weill grew up in Dessau, the son of a cantor. This is not going to be verisimilitude in regard to the black African experience. Add in the fact that it was written in 1949 (perhaps we're a little more sensitive to colonialism and race relations these days), and it seems unfair to me to take it out of context and dismiss it as simplistic. Or as my friend composer John Prestianni said, "Who would have thought anyone was writing about apartheid for Broadway in the 1940s?" Indeed!
Photos: via NY Daily News, Chuck Cooper as Stephen Kumalo and Sharon Washington as Grace Kumalo (who I worked with many years ago at the Yale Summer Cabaret- we were in a musical of Eric Ehn's together); and Quentin Earl Darrington as Leader, with the ensemble.

Happy Birthday, KW

I didn't realize it until I heard it on the radio just now, but today is Kurt Weill's 109th birthday. He is one of my favorite composers. A cantor's son, he studied composition with Busoni, wrote many great songs, not to mention Die Dreigroschen Oper, and married Lotte Lenya twice. Weill died when he was 50- not old by today's standards- in 1950. Perhaps Weill alone of all the German emigres became an American artist- he embraced American musical theatre in a way that Mann did not embrace the novel, for example. And his work still resonates; not just Bobby Darin's "Mack the Knife," but Teresa Stratas' interpretation of "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" and Elvis Costello's "Lost in the Stars." Not everyone likes Weill, but I think he's unfairly neglected. Have you ever heard Walter Huston sing "Venus and Mars" from Knickbocker Holiday? Or Lenya herself sing "Surabaya Johnny"? Or Mary Martin sing "It's Him"?