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‘Threepenny’ comments on class, morality

By Gaveliers, The Gavel Media Team, on May 3, 2010 12:55 AM

By Sue Byun, Assoc. News Editor -

This past weekend, Robsham Theater finished a titillating run of Bertol Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, with music by Kurt Weill and directed by Dr. Stuart J. Hecht.

The musical, is set in the seedy 1830s London Soho scene around the time of Queen Victoria’s coronation. By taking a dark look at the lives of prostituting and stealing low-lifes, antiheros, and incompetent law enforcers, its essential message is that middle-class morality is a luxury when one needs to make a living. Thus, in the musical, the ugliest of sinners win.

Based on John Gay’s eighteenth-century Beggar’s Opera, Threepenny Opera comments on the political corruption, poverty, and bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic, an era in post World War I Germany shortly before the ascent of Hitler. Announced as an opera “such as only a beggar can afford,” Brecht was bringing together elements of high culture with low culture. The musical deals with the idea that the lower class was very much at the mercy of those with money and power, as was very much the situation in Weimar, Germany.

The despairing tone of the time was certainly captured by the production’s dissonant music, foreboding organ notes, and expressive costumes. Film noir elements further set the mood of sex, cynicism, and criminal intrigue. Scene titles like “Concerning the insecurity of the human condition” cheaply announced themselves on the projector screen.

An abstract backdrop evoking a confusing industrial setting with doorways, jail bars, and deconstructed walls that came together at jagged angles. The stage was effective in creating an urban space in which sin ruled the streets and hopes were crushed.

With every arrogant turn of the head, tap of the foot, and his con artist smooth voice, Evan Cole, A&S ‘ was a charismatic presence indeed as Macheath, the rogue yet irresistible king of thieves.

Cythia Beckwith, CSOM ’12 sparkled as Polly Peachum, the daughter of a too worldly businessman who makes a living licensing beggars. She succumbs to the seduction of Macheath. Beckwith showed remarkable flexibility from one act to the next as flaxen-haired ingénue to surprisingly tough outlaw’s wife ready to take over her husband’s bandit empire as he ran from the law.

The musical’s pervading cynicism was punctured by hilarious comic relief. When Macheath’s ex-lover Lucy, played by Libby McKnight, A&S ’11, meets Polly, a catty argument bears out in Jealousy Duet, eliciting appreciative laughs from the audience as did Macheath’s motley gang’s crass antics.

Also hard to forget is Jenny, Macheath’s prostitute and ex-lover played by Lauren Tripolitis, A&S ’10. When fortune threw her lemons, Jenny slashed them to bits with her tough, life’s-a-bitch-and-then-you-die attitude – and Tripolitis captures this to great effect with her sulking, darkly erotic presence.

Yes, Threepenny Opera might have been publicized as a musical parable of sex, drugs, and lies, but it is also a parable of social commentary, that in a tough world where moral and economic concerns often pit against each other, it is sometimes the reality that you have to be a sinner to stay alive.

In a note from the director that appeared in the Threepenny program, Hecht wrote, “Brecht asks that we remember the poor and don’t romanticize them, for that is to ignore their realities; and do not judge their appetites and behaviors too harshly, for they are those desperately without.”