The days of theater on a “stage” are over — so proclaims Professor Cláudia Tatinge Nascimiento’s “The Threepenny Opera,” which opened last night in both the Memorial Chapel and the 92 Theater. In this visually and aurally stunning production, Professor Nascimiento doesn’t just brush against the fourth wall—she bursts through it flamboyantly and triumphantly (think Berlin circa 1989, minus David Hasselhoff). An extremely talented cast, underscored by stunning individual performances from Ben Vigus ’11 (Peachum), Sean Chin ’09 (Mack), Anna Martin ’09 (Polly), and others, including the outstanding musical crew led by conductor Angel Gil-Ordóñez, allowed Professor Nascimiento the creative freedom to adapt Brecht and Weill’s 1928 socialist commentary into a perfectly molded 2008 masterpiece.
Please forgive the lavish rhetoric, dear reader, but everything about “Threepenny” seemed to flow perfectly; the opera’s timing was especially stunning, with Mr. Gil-Ordóñez (who proved himself quite the actor) managing to synchronize each number perfectly with the singers. As prosaic as it may seem, coordination was at the heart of “Threepenny”’s success — in a production where the audience is seemingly as mobile as the actors, a missed cue or blown entrance could have made the entire audience — and show — awkward. It wasn’t, of course, and the tight coordination among singers, conductor and orchestra was an impressive feat that shouldn’t go unnoted.
“Threepenny” is set in Victorian London, where noted criminal Mack the Knife has married Polly Peachum, daughter of the Beggar-king Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum. He and his wife Celia (a perfect Cheryl Tan ’11) plead furiously with their daughter to divorce Mack. When she refuses, they decide that Mack has to hang, and force Mack’s old army buddy, the current Chief of Police Tiger Brown (Mark McCloughan ’10), to arrest Mack by threatening to disrupt the Queen’s coronation. In prison, Polly visits Mack, as does Lucy Brown (Ceci Lynn-Jacobs ’11), whom Mack has seemingly impregnated. Mack escapes the first arrest by bribing the prison guard Smith (Jake Hunt ’12), and accompanied by his wonderfully acted and choreographed band of thieves (John Gallagher ’12, Asa Horvitz ’10, Jaime Maseda ’11 and Zach Rebich ’11), runs straight to a whorehouse operated by Jenny Driver (Mica Taliaferro ’11). Jenny, however, has betrayed Mack to Peachum, and he is arrested and sentenced to death. After his attempts at bribery fail, the whole cast joins him on stage, and—in a classic example of Brecht’s parody of conventional theater—are greeted by the Queen’s horseman, who announces that Mack has not only been pardoned, but also given a baronetcy.
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil adapted “The Threepenny Opera” from an eighteenth century ballad opera called “The Beggar’s Opera” by John Gay to fit the troubling times of the Great Depression. “Threepenny,” which premiered in 1928, was a transformative piece of modern musical theater: Brecht, as was his style, toed slyly through the fourth wall by parodying not just the capitalist system, but also what an audience expects from theater. He called this parodying and prodding of the fourth wall Verfremdungseffekt, or the “alienation effect,” which, Brecht argued, “prevents the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor, and which consequently leads the audience to be a consciously critical observer.” By moving the audience many times (up, down and even to a different building), consciously incorporating the audience into the dialogue (we were invited to “come downstairs to a wedding” between Mack and Polly) and highlighting these moments in Brecht’s libretto (Lucy says to Polly, “Do carry on as if you had an audience,” and then pauses dramatically), Professor Nascimiento sends a wrecking ball through the fourth wall in a way that would certainly have made Bertolt Brecht proud.
Not only did Professor Nascimiento use the audience’s movement to break the fourth wall, she also used the talent of the actors themselves: each character became an overly dramatized caricature, whose emotions and psyche were plainly visible for the whole audience to see. This over-dramatization of the characters worked perfectly, creating a space for dialogue between actors and audience, where each side could participate in the understanding and creating—and the mocking—of the traditional “roles” and emotions of theater. (For a quick rundown: Jenny was overtly sexualized, Mack became the classic anti-hero, Tiger Brown was the coward, Polly the diva and Peachum the capitalist scumbag). This dialogue between audience and actor not only cleared space for a Brechtian “conscious critical observer,” but also allowed the audience to see that the production didn’t take itself too seriously. This, perhaps more than everything else, was what made “Threepenny” such a success.
Leave a Reply