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music by Kurt Weill, book and lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, directed by Stephen Ouimette

Avon Theatre, Stratford

May 29-November 2, 2002

"Alienation to No Effect"

It was a brave decision for the Stratford Festival to stage Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera” to open the “renewed” (i.e. completely remodelled) Avon Theatre.  The 1928 anti-opera was written to skewer precisely the bourgeois notion of the benefit of amassing ever more capital, including cultural capital, that the Festival itself is built on.  And yet, unsparing though it is,  it is most popular work either Brecht or Weill ever wrote.  With a mostly excellent cast this show could have given the Festival the tang and edge that it has so sorely lacked for the past ten years, but it requires an experienced director to bring out its mixture of satire and anger.  Jean Gascon directed the work on its last Stratford outing in 1972 starring Weill’s widow Lotte Lenya.  This time the mistake was made to assign it to a first-time director, Stephen Ouimette.  Ouimette is justly acclaimed as one of Canada’s finest actors, but he proves to be the wrong person to make the show work.

“The Threepenny Opera” (“Die Dreigroschenoper”) is Brecht and Weill’s adaptation of John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera”  written in 1728 to satirize the extravagances of Italian opera, especially by Handel, then the rage in London.  Gay counters the fantasies of the wealthy with an opera written from the point of view of the realities of the poor.  Brecht refashioned Gay’s work into a thoroughgoing critique of capitalism and bourgeois morality. In place of Gay’s ballads, Weill wrote a series of cabaret songs whose jagged rhythms and tart melodies pay homage to popular music even as they send it up.  The influence of the kind of smart, satirical musical Brecht and Weill created is still felt in the musicals of Kander and Ebb (“Cabaret”), Stephen Sondheim (“Assassins”) and now Hollmann and Kotis (“Urinetown”). 

Using Marc Blitzstein’s 1951 adaptation, Ouimette gets into trouble on several fronts.  Like many first-time directors of Brecht, Ouimette is fascinated by Brecht’s theory of the alienation effect (“Verfremdungseffekt”) whereby the audience is not permitted to identify with the characters by encourage to look at their situation objectively.  Brecht’s alienation effect is already built in to “The Threepenny Opera”--scenes are titled and announced, the songs illustrate general themes in the action rather than further character or plot and the songs and much dialogue is addressed directly to the audience. 

Ouimette adds more alienation devices to the show while approving design decisions that go counter to the show’s anti-bourgeois message.  He ruins the show’s opening ballad and most famous song “Mack the Knife” by having an actor dressed as a homeless person enter from the audience, wrest the mike from the Street Singer and begin singing the song himself.  The ensuing staged commotion ensures that the words go unheard even though they are crucial to presenting the central character.  The scene titles usually in the form of placards shown to the audience here are flashed to the audience on a lowered pixelboard.  The high-tech addition is contrary to the show’s conception as an opera by and  for the poor.  Brecht’s principle of non-identification encourages doubling of roles.  “Threepenny” can be staged with as few as twelve actors.  Here  the lavishness of the present cast of 27 contrasts with the work’s objectives.  Ouimette presents the show on a bare stage with the actions of actor/stage-hands visible, but then the various elements of Peter Hartwell’s set are just as often used to hide the bare back wall.  Props such as the marriage bed or the rising platform for the King’s Messenger are so elaborate they contradict the initial idea of spareness.

Worse than the unclear presentation is the show’s lethargic pacing.  One need only listen to the classic 1958 recording by Brückner-Rüggeberg with Lotte Lenya, to realize that conductor Don Horsburgh and his 7-man band take most of the songs too slowly and that few of the actors know how to sing Weill with the punch and bite that makes him so distinctive.  The main source of humour in the piece is its parody of the music and themes of opera, but except for the “Jealousy Duet” and the Act 3 Finale, Ouimette never brings this out.  Even then when a song manages to muster some energy, the energy dissipates in the lassitude of the dialogue.  Allowing an intermission between Acts 2 and 3 further destroys what little momentum the show has.   Ouimette’s direction thus completely misses what should be the sardonic interplay of the serious and mock-serious, the meaning and the genre.

The three most successful players, both as actors and singers are Sheila McCarthy (Mrs. Peachum), Susan Gilmour (Jenny) and Blythe Wilson (Lucy).  McCarthy’s rendition of “The Ballad of Dependency” in Act 2, her voice filled with anger and disdain, gives us the first indication of the tone the whole show  should have.  Gilmour  later sets the evening on track again with the authentic cabaret feel she gives to “Solomon’s Song” .  Wilson, clad as a horse-trainer in black leather, does not give us the mock-Wagnerian Lucy of the classic recording.  Instead she brings out the bitterness and regret of the “Barbara Song” and the fury of the “Fight about Property” with such venom and vitality she almost single-handedly resuscitates the whole production.  In contrast, Diana Coatsworth in the important role of Polly Peachum is not up to the task of bringing out the humour of Polly’s incredible naïveté or making her songs anything but bland.

Tom McCamus (Macheath, i.e. Mack the Knife) is good at showing a kind of callous world-weariness but doesn’t really give us sense of utter evil lurking beneath cheap elegance.  Peter Donaldson (Peachum) focusses entirely on his character’s anger and never gets at the humour of his false piety.  George Masswohl (Tiger Brown) makes the police chief more oafish than slimy.

   

It doesn’t seem that Ouimette has asked much of choreographer Donna Feore.  A tabletop hands-in-shoes routine for “The Song about Inadequacy”, a tango for “The Procurer’s Ballad” and a white-gloves dance for “The Ballad of Pleasant Living” stand out as isolated moments of clever movement in the general plod.  More too could have been asked of lighting designer John Munro .  But this is in general a show characterized by a lack of directorial imagination.

There is always an element of didacticism to Brecht’s works but what has made them live is their abundant theatricality.  If the Festival does not have enough of the right personnel or a director with the right experience to bring this out, why schedule a show like “The Threepenny Opera” that requires both?  If the largest theatre festival in North America can’t pull off Brecht’s most popular work, how can it  hope to move on as it should to the masterpieces that don’t have the benefit of Weill’s famous tunes?

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Peter Donaldson and Sheila McCarthy. ©2002 Stratford Festival.