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Scott Elliott’s perverse new staging of The Threepenny Opera
has all the ingredients that have made the show a roaring success since its 1928 premiere – a tuneful score by Kurt Weill, an abrasive theatricality and double-edged political commentary generated by playwright and director Bertolt Brecht – but to appreciate them you have to work pretty hard. The production doesn’t have an idea in its head beyond parading its kicky mixture of Broadway veterans (Alan Cumming, Jim Dale) and pop culture stars (Cyndi Lauper, Nellie McKay, TV’s Ana Gasteyer) in costumes by Isaac Mizrahi with as much gender-bending and sexual display as possible.
The performances are a mixed bag, starting with Cumming as Macheath (“Mack the Knife,” as the show’s most famous song dubs him), whose performance is a pale echo of his electrifying Broadway debut as the MC in
Cabaret. Instead of a charismatic gangster, he plays Macheath in a Mohawk as a pansexual punk, locking lips with women, men, and trannies. (In what will surely become this production’s claim to infamy, jealous girlfriend Lucy Brown is played by a man in drag – Brian Charles Rooney -- complete with
Crying Game moment.) Lauper as the aging whore Jenny Diver is tentative at first, but singing “Solomon Song” she’s perfectly lit and coiffed to resemble Marlene Dietrich in
The Blue Angel. Innocence and knowingness superbly cohabit McKay’s portrayal of Macheath’s young bride, Polly Peachum, but her voice grates, as if she’s singing just out of her range. And as her mother Gasteyer, who recently starred in the Chicago production of
Wicked, bellows every line as if it’s “Defying Gravity.”
The show was written during Hitler’s ascendancy (five years after it opened, Weill, a Jew, had to flee Germany for his life), and today one could view
Threepenny Opera as an ironic depiction of how thieves and criminals end up running the country. But this production soft-pedals the politics, concentrating on a shallow, salacious tour of the
demi-monde.
The Advocate, May 23, 2006
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