[This article appears in the current March|April 2018 issue of Boston Spirit magazine. For a free subscription, click here.]
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 classic “The Threepenny Opera” isn’t often performed by opera companies. The story-and-song structure is closer to the realm of musical theater. But Boston Lyric Opera (BLO) embraces a wider repertoire this spring as it taps iconic 20th Century works. Besides “The Threepenny Opera,” which runs March 16 – 25 at the Huntington Avenue Theater, the BLO will stage two Leonard Bernstein works, ”Trouble in Tahiti” and “Arias & Barcarolles,” in May.
“The Threepenny Opera,” with songs such as “The Ballad of Mack the Knife” and “Pirate Jenny” that have passed into the popular canon, seems the perfect vehicle for the Boston debut of director James Darrah, who is equally at home with classical and modern opera. Boston Spirit spoke to Darrah via Skype while he was in Germany rehearsing a new production of Handel’s “Alcina.” Last year, he directed the acclaimed world premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s operatic adaptation of Lars von Trier’s film “Breaking the Waves” for Opera Philadelphia. The production was nominated for a 2016 International Opera Award for best world premiere.
Darrah says his background in classical theater including acting—he holds an MFA from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television—provided him with knowledge and appreciation of good storytelling.“The kind of unique nature of ‘Threepenny Opera’ as music and theater is intriguing and exciting to me. I’d always loved Kurt Weill’s music and spent time with the plays of Brecht, but never directed or been involved with the piece so that was a major draw [to direct it for the BLO],” he says. “The piece is applicable to any time you may be in. It’s the right time now but so is anytime, which is a testament to its durability as a work of art.
“It changes or evolves thematically but that’s also a testament to how prescient Brecht was to know some of the predicaments we find ourselves currently in. It’s surprising how predictive he was about human nature.”
Brecht teamed with composer Weill on the adaptation of “The Beggar’s Opera,” a play with music by John Gay, during the Weimar era in Germany. “The Threepenny Opera” proved popular with audiences and was regularly staged before the Nazis rose to power in 1933. The show’s irony-laced skewering of capitalist values is told through assorted beggars, cheats, opportunists and criminals in Victorian London on the eve of a royal coronation. These include Macheath (a.k.a. Mack the Knife) who’ll be played by Christopher Burchett. Macheath’s quick marriage to Polly Peachum (Kelly Kaduce) angers her father (James Maddalena) who exerts his influence and gets Macheath arrested and sentenced to hang. MacHeath then visits Jenny (Renee Tatum), his former lover and a prostitute. He laments his criminal ways and begs forgiveness before facing the gallows. BLO favorites Michelle Trainor as Mrs. Peachum and Chelsea Basler as Lucy Brown round out the cast.
The acton takes place in London but Darrah says one of the strengths of the production will be “the enigmatic abstraction …we’ve tried to create a production that is more like an imagined locale,” he says. “It looks ‘period’ but it’s not intentionally overwrought … because you want people to connect as they are.” There are complex, interesting people in the text, he says, citing Jenny in particular. “She’s the old love of Macheath and their entire story takes place before you see a single scene in ‘Threepenny.’ There’s very little detail about it so you are kind of jumping into the middle of a world. We are trying to create a very overtly theatrical world that is not concerned with naturalism and can create images and physical relationships that are interesting and intriguing,” he says.
Darrah, who’ll return to Massachusetts over the summer to conduct a Leonard Bernstein centennial concert at Tanglewood, studied classical music and can play several instruments. During a trip to Croatia for a theater program, Darrah participated in two opera productions, Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Verdi’s “Nabucco.” He was drawn to the form and, once at UCLA, he pursued opera direction in earnest even though theater was his primary field of study.
The result was the “right amalgam of those different backgrounds,” he says.
Darrah jumped at the chance to direct “The Threepenny Opera” for BLO but knew it wouldn’t be presented as traditional opera; it will be sung in English without supertitles. There are more substantial differences. “It’s not just catchy tunes or beautifully sung phrases where you can coast on having beautiful color in your voice. It needs to have a level of connection to the text constantly … all opera has that, but the lyric quality of Weill is different,” he says. “The modernity of it shouldn’t look domestic or normal but not so decorous or ornate that it removes [the viewer’s] ability to connect to the through-line of the story.”
Darrah’s fidelity to Brecht and Weill doesn’t mean he won’t explore more contemporary nuances such as gender roles and sexuality with the characters and their relationships. “Today, ideally, we’re more open [about sexuality and gender] and the piece has opportunities—not to exploit that or latch onto it in a heavy-handed way—but to use the text as written to illuminate these human beings in a way that feels relevant to us from a political, social and sexual point of view,” he says. “Maybe it will illuminate something about ourselves that is uncomfortable.”
