For more than 250 years, a tale of murderers, thieves, beggars and prostitutes has seduced audiences on both sides of the Atlantic-and beyond.
So perhaps it`s no surprise that even today-in the era of heavy metal music and high-tech media-a lowdown, bawdy show that first bowed in 1728 is headed for both Broadway and the movies.
Like no other musical before or since, ”The Threepenny Opera” seems to perpetually redefine the term ”radical chic.” How else to explain the new, $4-million stage production, which features rock star Sting (formerly of the Police) and opens on Broadway next month in a run that already is virtually sold out for the rest of this year? Or the new film version, titled ”Mack the Knife,” which will receive its world premiere at 7 p.m. Sunday in the Chicago Theatre (to be released nationally later this year), as the kickoff for the 25th annual Chicago International Film Festival?
Clearly, the darkly cynical show-which author Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill created in 1928 and based on John Gay`s satirical ”The Beggar`s Opera” of 1728-hasn`t lost its bite.
”`The Beggar`s Opera` is nearly 300 years old, `Threepenny` is already 60 years old, but their relevance today is frightening,” says Sting, in his dressing room at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C., where
”Threepenny” closed its pre-Broadway run on Sunday (reopening at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York Nov. 5).
”The show is about people who are disenfranchised politically, socially, economically-in every way.
”And you can go maybe 20 yards from this theater to see people just like them who are living in cardboard boxes.
”People like this do not obey the rules, and that`s part of what
`Threepenny` is all about.”
Indeed, the desperation of its characters-who commit bigamy, adultery, larceny and a litany of other crimes by routine-seems to be part of
”Threepenny`s” timelessness. Desperate people commit desperate acts, the show suggests, and the tough economic turns of the 1980s seem to be making
”Threepenny” more timely than ever.
”Perhaps `Threepenny` is suddenly turning up so much because of how it relates to the world today,” says Raul Julia, who plays the title role in
”Mack the Knife,” the new film version of Brecht and Weill`s
”Threepenny.”
”There are homeless people all over the country, very much like there were in England when `The Beggar`s Opera` came out in the 18th Century, and in Germany, when `Threepenny` came out in the `20s.
”The homeless people lived in the streets, the bankers controlled the economy, and nobody was doing much about poverty then, either.”
To what degree economic and social conditions inspired these two major revivals, plus the spate of productions due next year (see accompanying story) is anyone`s guess. But at the very least, the enduring appeal of
”Threepenny” suggests that Brecht and Weill-as well as Gay and composer Christopher Pepusch two centuries earlier-captured in words and music a netherworld at once fascinating and believable, lurid and alluring.
By all accounts, Gay wrote ”The Beggar`s Opera” at the suggestion of the pre-eminent Anglo-Irish satirist of the 18th Century, Jonathan Swift, author of ”Gulliver`s Travels” and other satirical tales.
Certainly Gay followed Swift`s lead, crafting a lacerating satire about the highwayman Macheath, a notorious thief and womanizer whose latest conquest is Polly Peachum, daughter of a man who runs a gang of pickpockets. The elder Peachum, himself a crook, is so outraged at the prospect of having the criminal Macheath as a son-in-law that he conspires to have him hanged, greasing his plan with a good deal of bribery and extortion. ”Corruption in all its forms is the stuff out of which the dramatic side of the opera is made,” explains New Kobbe`s Complete Opera Book.
The music for ”The Beggar`s Opera,” too, bristled with satire, its bawdy ballads spoofing Italian opera in general and the arch strains of Handelian opera in particular.
All of which forged a runaway hit in 1728 and inspired another in 1928, when Brecht and Weill updated the story. Though ”Threepenny,” like its forebear, was set in the king`s England, its tawdry characters of the night and their amoral activities obviously served as a metaphor for Germany on the eve of the Nazi ascension.
The true genius of the show, however, was its music. Like no other score before it, Weill`s ”Threepenny” expressed profound emotions through tangos, ballads, cabaret songs and other forms of the common man. Here was musical theater as telling as anything by Verdi or Puccini, but expressed in the bittersweet, disillusioned vernacular of pre-World War II Germany. Little wonder ”Threepenny” tunes, such as ”The Ballad of Mack the Knife,” became the street songs of pre-Hitler Germany (as well as America in the late `50s, as in Bobby Darin`s hit recording of ”Mack the Knife”).
The effect of this sardonic new music and corrosive old story was so powerful that when, in 1931, director G.W. Pabst turned ”Threepenny” into a film starring Weill`s wife, Lotte Lenya (see adjoining story), the Nazis seized and destroyed every copy in Germany. (It wasn`t until recent years that scholars were able to piece together the original film from prints that had been forgotten in far corners of the world.)
”The music for `Threepenny,` like the text, is angular, angry and witty,” says Sting, whose own deeply literate songs share some of these qualities. ”`Threepenny` doesn`t have the buttons that a `normal` musical has-big climactic numbers and sentimental love songs.
”The tunes in `Threepenny` just kind of stop abruptly, and the audience doesn`t know whether to clap or what to do. The songs make the audience uncomfortable, and that`s useful in a show such as this.
”The songs also are powerful because Brecht and Weill dared to write political material. They put ideas into their songs that don`t obey the rules- it`s not just `moon` and `June` stuff.
”When you`re performing a song by Brecht and Weill, you`re singing about the moral code-and that`s the kind of thing that just isn`t normally sung.”
Certainly it isn`t usually sung by a rock star more accustomed to crooning into a microphone for an audience numbering in the thousands.
”Considering that Mack is a little strange, a little schizophrenic, a little wacko, maybe being a rock star is kind of helpful in playing this role,” quips Sting, who is undeniably charismatic in the role of the show`s central character.
”But, on the other hand, normally actors get a chance to work things out in lots of privacy.
”Unfortunately, when you`re me, and you do your first night, everybody comes-`Entertainment Tonight,` the big critics, everyone, and they`re all very quick to damn something,” adds Sting, who, along with the rest of the show, was hit by negative reviews when the production opened in Washington last month.
”I think the flow has come an awfully long way since the first night:
We`ve tightened up the show, cut out about 15 minutes. We`re hoping that by the time we get to New York, we`ll have something really stunning.”
But are audiences willing to see a ”classic” stage musical as performed by a singer more at home in a rock den than a legitimate theater?
”I find we`re getting two different audiences,” says Sting. ”We`re getting rock fans who have never been in a theater in their life, have never seen a play. And we`re getting the old theatergoers who want to see a rock star make a fool of himself.
”But that`s fine with me-that mixture of people creates a tension in the audience that delights me.”
How the New York critics will feel about Sting as Mack remains to be seen. They`ll certainly have no difficulty telling the difference between the rock star`s production and the new film: Sting`s show emphasizes light humor in the brisk, musical-comedy tradition of Broadway; the ”Mack the Knife”
film offers a far darker view, bringing out the corrosive, decadent core of the original.
”Above all, `Threepenny` deals with the oppression of the poor by the rich, and I believe that`s what Menahem Golan (director of `Mack the Knife`)
was trying to capture,” says Julia, who is at once appealing and threatening as Mack. ”When we made the film, we didn`t want it to sound like an opera or a Broadway show-it was supposed to sound like the kind of popular singing you might have heard in Germany in the `20s.”
Regardless of style, ”Threepenny” is here to stay.
Says Sting: ”It`s definitely in the air.”
