The Cast of “The Threepenny Opera”/Photo: Time Stops Photography
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There’s a moment in “The Threepenny Opera”–Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s 1928 musical, which has been impressively remounted at Evanston’s Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre–where criminal mastermind Macheath (played by Carl Herzog) expresses annoyance at his ragged gang of cutthroats for not fully appreciating his beloved’s musical talent. “That’s art!” exclaims the psychopathic antihero. “Art isn’t nice!”
There’s nothing “nice” about “Threepenny,” a no-holds-barred assault on every aspect of bourgeois existence, from religion to marriage and family to the military to law and order. Directed by Theo Ubique’s co-founder and artistic director Fred Anzevino, this production captures the work’s aggressive rawness and decadent, Weimar-era atmosphere, while keeping it relevant for a modern audience dealing with our own century’s manifestations of corruption, injustice and hypocrisy.
Chamaya Moody and Carl Herzog in “The Threepenny Opera”/Photo: Time Stops Photography
The plot–based on British playwright John Gay’s 1728 satirical ballad opera, “The Beggar’s Opera”–concerns the jauntily vile Macheath as he robs, murders and seduces his way across the underbelly of a great city, at every step revealing deeper levels of vice, cant and degradation. Among his acquaintanceship are Mr. and Mrs. Peachum (Thomas M. Shea and Megan Elk), who control the city’s begging racket, training and outfitting squadrons of panhandlers who benefit from the fact that, as Mr. Peachum puts it, “The powerful create poverty but can’t bear to look at it.” The couple makes generous use of the Bible in creating their signs and posters, noting that “the Good Book contains four or five real moneymakers.”
Macheath runs away with Polly, the Peachums’ young and oddly innocent daughter (played by Chamaya Moody), arranging to marry her in the fetid stable that serves as his gang’s headquarters. But of course there are other women in the dashing Macheath’s life, including Jenny, a prostitute (Liz Bollar), and Lucy (Nathe Rowbotham), the daughter of Tiger Brown (Michael Mejia), the police chief who is also Macheath’s old army buddy and protector. That friendly attitude comes in handy against the Peachums, who want their daughter back and Macheath destroyed, by any means necessary.
It all sounds more serious than it is. Brecht reminds us time and again that his characters are purely social types, not complex and emotionally alive human beings, and that the operetta-like scenario is just that, an entertaining fable rather than a plausible narrative. It’s the songs that are the raison d’etre for “Threepenny,” and the gifted cast, under the guidance of music director and pianist Ryan Brewster, belt out an anthology of classics–not just the anthemic “Ballad of Mack the Knife,” but also “Pirate Jenny,” “Army Song” and “Tango Ballad”–with aplomb. The singers infuse Weill’s harsh, dissonant chords and Brecht’s often unrhymed, unconventional and plainspoken lyrics with passion, biting into such lines as, “We crave to be more kindly than we are … But you know, circumstance won’t have it so.” Here and elsewhere, Marc Blitzstein’s translation is skillfully executed, hitting us with aphoristic, unembellished truth.
Megan Elk and Thomas M. Shea in “The Threepenny Opera”/Photo: Time Stops Photography
Herzog, elegantly costumed by Cindy Moon, is a cool and fastidious Macheath, a thug with style and social pretensions, and the golden-voiced Moody acquits herself well as his deluded bride Polly, whose naïveté may be just a bit cosmetic. But it’s Shea and especially Elk who steal the show as the comically rapacious–and repulsive–Peachums. With her heavily rouged lips and maniacal smile, Elk’s Mrs. Peachum comes off as the nasty, puppet-like Judy to her husband’s brutally pragmatic Punch.
Director Anzevino makes fine use of Theo Ubique’s open space. As the performers circulate among the tables, seats and bar, the show takes on a flowing, energized immediacy, drawing us into the action. Maggie Fullilove-Nugent earns kudos for her creative lighting design, using darker tints and a watery mist to suggest Soho’s dank, shadow-shrouded streets, a place of darkness both physical and spiritual.
Eventually, that darkness becomes monotonous over the play’s two-and-a-half hours, including intermission. This is due in part to the production’s limited musical accompaniment, which consists solely of a piano rather than the small jazz ensemble that’s sometimes used. By Act III, the songs run together, sounding more like Bobby Darin-style pop ballads than the sharper-edged, old-timey sounds of chanteuse Lotte Lenya, the wife of Kurt Weill and the original interpreter of “Mack the Knife.”
The deeper problem is in the songs themselves, every single one of which is a somber, vaguely nerve-wracking ode to human weakness, folly and failure. The play is so damning of its low-life milieu that it makes one wonder whether humanity is even worth saving from the ills of capitalism. It presents itself as resolutely amoral, in fact, a travesty of conventional ethical values–yet deep down it’s relentlessly and even tediously moralistic. To this critic, it has always seemed that the play is charged less with revolutionary fervor than with a disgusted, Christian-inflected disillusionment bordering on nihilism. There’s a savage wit on display here, but it’s not wielded lightly by the playwright.
With all its conflicts and contradictions–including the fact that this anti-capitalist broadside is being presented by a non-union company–this is still the single best Brecht production I’ve ever seen on a Chicago stage. Veteran director Anzevino and company know what works in cabaret, and the concept–dark, broad and boldly theatrical–is right on target. This “Threepenny Opera” is not pretty, but it is indeed art. And if the theater gods are just, it will be a hit.
Theo Ubique at the Howard Street Theatre, 721 Howard Street, Evanston, (773)939-4101, theo-u.com. $45-$55. Through April 30.
