Threepenny Opera Reviews — Page 5

So, someone correct me if I am wrong: there has yet to be one person in this show who hasn't received both a positive and a negative review.

Ana, pros and cons
Rooney, pros and cons
Cyndi, pros and cons
Jim, pros and cons
Alan, pros and cons
Nellie, pros and cons

Would I be out of line to say these are the most mixed bag reviews for a group of actors that I've seen in quite a few years?

My prediction: these reviews say NOTHING about Tony chances.

---

People don't generally win Tonys though for shows with reviews like these, so it probably doesn't matter that they each have received some pro and con personal notices.

Variety is Mostly Negative:

"Timing is everything. While any time is ostensibly the right time for "The Threepenny Opera," the enterprise has been trumped this season by an exemplary application of Brechtian staging principles to depict a society rotten to the core in Broadway's riveting reinvention of "Sweeney Todd." Even without the stiff competition, however, the landmark Brecht-Weill musical would be a botched job this time around, directed and adapted with sledgehammer subtlety by Scott Elliott and Wallace Shawn, respectively. While the cast is game and talented, the production is sunk by its one-note sleaziness and puerile provocation. Forget alienation effect, this is just plain off-putting.

Given that it clobbers you over the head with surfaced subtext for nearly three hours, the show should come with a migraine warning. Elliott has taken his cue from the decadent past of the Studio 54 venue, piling on enough gutter glamour and chic perversion to animate a whole summer of gay circuit parties, plus a touring company or two of "The Rocky Horror Show."
_______________________________________________________________

Some of the staging is effective. The "beggars" enter from the audience onto a naked stage, plucking costumes from racks and applying makeup during the overture. Jenny (Cyndi Lauper), the prostitute former lover of outlaw Macheath (Alan Cumming), begins the "Moritat" (here titled "Song of the Extraordinary Crimes of Mac the Knife") unaccompanied, before being joined by the ensemble in a gruesome kickline under a jumble of multicolored neon identifying the play's locations.

But things get bogged down immediately thereafter with the book scenes, which generally are flat and tedious. Shawn's jokey adaptation trivializes the play into a lurid burlesque without texture, alternating moments of vaudeville and British music hall with sketch comedy and belabored illustrations of current relevance.
______________________________________________________________

Vocally, too, "Threepenny" is well served. Stepping in after Edie Falco dropped out due to "Sopranos" commitments, Lauper betrays a hint of impersonation in her Weimar warbling, but the pop diva knows how to command an audience in a song, which makes up for her slightly stiff acting. Her lovely, rueful take on "Solomon Song" benefits enormously from the simple staging. Likewise her betrayal tango with Macheath, "The Ballad of the Pimp," one of the few places where Aszure Barton's Fosse-macabre choreography doesn't look mannered.
________________________________________________________________

Jim Dale brings wily vaudevillian humor to the unscrupulous Mr. Peachum, particularly in the jaunty "Song of Inadequacy of Human Striving." As his venal wife, Gasteyer's powerhouse pipes, coupled with her shrill comic characterization, become a little wearing. Doing distaff duty with smirking aplomb, Rooney displays a fine soprano on "The Jealousy Duet" and "Lucy's Aria," sung in German.

The real surprise is singer-songwriter Nellie McKay, a genuinely odd and appealing stage presence who seems to have time-traveled in from another era. Dressed in dusty, corpse-bride white, and with her fresh-faced looks, dreamy eccentricity and sing-song dialogue delivery, McKay is an arresting match for Macheath's young wife, Polly Peachum. She gets the balance of naivety and cunning just right, and her savvy spin on "Pirate Jenny" and "The 'No' Song" places them among the production's better numbers."





http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117930285?categoryid=1265&cs=1

---

Updated On: 4/21/06 at 12:36 AM

I think Brecht and Weil would have enjoyed these reviews and this discussion.
Do you think any Roundabout Patrons will go Home and discuss paying for sex and what positions Whores and Killers have in Our Modern Society?

I don't mean to brag but...

Pans for the show?

Raves for McKay?

Sounds like my review:

The ThreePenny She-bopera: Where’s Bobby Darin when you need him?

Sunday March 26, 2006

After sitting through the endlessly boring revival of “The Threepenny Opera” over at “Studio 54”, I thought to myself that had Bobby Darin caught this production and not the infamous Off-Broadway production in the 1950’s, we would have most certainly been deprived of his legendary rendition of the musical’s opening number “Mack The Knife”.

Flatter than canned soda on a summer day, horribly mangled and misinterpreted, this revival lumbers on till you want Macheath to lash your own throat.

With a horrific new translation by Wallace Shawn, non-direction by Scott Elliot and possibly the most ugly costumes ever to grace a stage by Isaac Mizrahi, this show can’t even be called a trainwreck.

Trainwrecks have speed, points of view, and direction.

This, my friends, is a slow boat to China. Very slow.

Also, may I note, that when one uses the term “opera” in a title, it usually indicates that, even at the simplest level, the piece will have a lot of music in it.

Not so, this “Threepenny”.

It feels as if hours go by before any of the numbers happen and when they do – they fail to register.

I had hoped the performances might enliven the piece but, in most cases, that’s not how it went down.

Alan Cumming, whose character by the way is reduced to an afterthought here, isn’t he the lead, is capable if uninspired.

Jim Dale manages to steal the show every moment he’s on stage. No mean feat.

Ana Gasteyer is a bit to braying at times vocally but otherwise comically capable as expected.

Cyndi Lauper, while vocally secure, displayed a performance more under-cooked than revelatory. She simply forgot most of her lines. One feels this may change with time but right now this is not the “Tony Shoo-in” it is being touted as.

The real revelation came in the form of Nellie McKay. Ravishing in her blond wig and wedding gown, McKay intoned her lines with a creamy MGM innocence that has to be heard to be believed. If vocally, Miss. McKay seems a bit over-parted, one never feels one is in anything less than the presence of a performer assured in her task of bringing her character to life. A true delight.

Vocal and comedic honors of the evening go to Brian Charles Rooney who sings the hell out of ‘Lucy’s aria” and was simply a riot in the scene that followed it.

Poor Bobby Darin. First, Kevin Spacey and now this.





Updated On: 3/27/06 at 09:01 AM

All I wanted to see was something good.

So did the Critics.

All I have to say is HECK YEAH...

would it be Brecht/Weill if the Critics LIKED it?? no

and the screaming people cheering every night is plenty for me :)

thanks to the sweet people on here who have been supportive... AND to those who, although might have negative reviews, have been respectful...

to those who haven't been respectful, try to take minute the next time you knock down an entire group of artists' work... Art is subjective, we all know that, but if you don't respond to it, or don't like it, as long as the art doesn't degrade life or love, there is no reason for you to do so.

welcome to Tony time...
-bcr

As I sat through this production (of which there was a great deal to admire...particularly the performances...particularly McKay), I was reminded of the production my college did my senior year (1996, if anyone is counting).

It was similar in that it mixed periods...Victorian touches with latex, leather and vinyl. Lots of very heavy Goth makeup and lots of anger. It was a bit of a freakshow.

During the hanging of Macheath (in which they actually hung him and then saved him), they did this angry march dance under his dangling body. I remember being at a party with the choreographer and turned to him and said, 'Ya know what that moment needed? A great big happy tap break while Macheath was hanging.' And he realized how f*cked up that would be and said, 'If I ever do this show again, I'm adding tap!'

I think so many people get caught up in what is traditionally Brechtian that they don't go that one step further and think, 'What will really unsettle the audience.'

I'd love to see a production set on Wisteria Lane...where everyone is dressed quite well and the set is actually kind of bucolic (sp???). But everything that comes out of everyone's mouths is just hideous. I think so many are waiting for the traditional types of techniques used in this show. I think presenting it like a traditional musical could f*ck with a lot of people's heads.

---

I'm trying to brace myself for the inevitable...

When Scott Elliott says that he knew all along that the staid New York critics wouldn't "get" his production, and that he's proud to shake up audiences with his iconoclastic vision.

It's hard to say which is worse for Broadway: bad commercial theatre, or bad "artistic" theatre. I vote for the latter.

I also love the posts that say the horrendous reviews are what Brecht and Weill would have wanted. Would these people be saying that if the show had gotten raves?

---

NY Daily News is negative:

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/story/410570p-347372c.html

Had the original 1928 production been as listless and numbing as the revival Scott Elliott has directed at Studio 54 - with a cast including Alan Cumming, Jim Dale, Ana Gasteyer, Cyndi Lauper and Nellie McKay - the work would have been quickly forgotten, and the Nazis could have concentrated their energies on their other projects.

The main reason "Threepenny" has survived is Weill's score, especially "Mack the Knife." One of the few worthwhile things about this revival is that it retains his orchestrations, which still, 80 years later, sound remarkably fresh.

The melodies themselves are often muffled because the lyrics, in a new translation by Wallace Shawn, are so clumsy and ill-fitting. Shawn has also made the spoken text unusually crude.

Brecht's story of the lack of honor among thieves, presumably a parable of capitalism, had a brashness but also a tongue-in-cheek tone that balanced its orthodox Marxism.

Shawn's translation might have been shocking in, say, 1968, but its potty-language dramaturgy is merely tiresome.

A few performers manage to brighten the grim proceedings. Despite his spiked hair, which makes him look like an R. Crumb character, Dale gives his ruthless character a lively music-hall charm. As his daughter, McKay projects an unexpected innocence, though she throws away the great "Pirate Jenny" song. Why Lauper wanted to do the show is a mystery, and she adds nothing to "Mack the Knife" or the more interesting "Solomon Song."

Cumming plays the hero Macheath, dipping into his standard bag of tricks for the umpteenth time. Gasteyer has a solid voice but plays her part on one strident note.

Isaac Mizrahi's costumes enhance the cartoon quality of the evening. Looney Tunes used to last seven minutes. This seems interminable.

NYPOST is negative:

Director Scott Elliott obviously decided to go for broke in making the production as authentically Brechtian as he could, even having Wallace Shawn prepare a new and gritty version of the original German text by Brecht and Elizabeth Hauptmann.

But authentic is as authentic does, and in "The Threepenny Opera," authenticity can come at an awesome price: a touch of boredom.

Mind you, just a touch. Weill's music, the most insidiously seductive sounds the 20th century ever heard, would carry the recitation of real estate ads, especially if read by Dale, who can entrance millions by reading "Harry Potter."

Brecht, alas, hasn't weathered the years as well. His theories of alienation - making sure the audience is constantly aware that it is watching theater - no longer fascinate, while his Marxian politics now sound appallingly simplistic.

As Lotte Lenya, Weill's wife and inimitable interpreter, later put it, Weill himself tired of "setting the Communist manifesto to music." It was a point well made.



It was the great Lenya who starred in the original 1928 Berlin production, and it was Lenya again who played Jenny (this time round it's an adorably blowzy Lauper) in composer Marc Blitzstein's famous off-Broadway adaptation in 1954.

This time it's certainly a plus that the original Weill orchestrations are used (although Blitzstein's were pretty faithful) and we have more of the music than in any other New York production.

And unfortunately, much more of the Brecht, which Shawn has vividly adapted in an intellectually justifiable attempt to translate the 1928/1954 shock value to 2006, with a sexual explicitness and scatological frankness that far outdistances the original.

Elliott has also applied his own individual concept of Brechtian acting on his unfortunate cast.

Some survive better than others. Cumming's gangster-pimp Mack the Knife, probably the original anti-hero, has a sardonic grace, a Scots accent that for the first time makes sense of the "Mac" in Macheath, and a singing voice that is fair enough except when Elliott prevails upon him, against Weill's express intentions, to shout.

In a misguided attempt to add a special "Brechtian" touch, Elliott has cast Lucy, one of the two warring ladies fighting over Mack, as a man in drag - exposing his never particularly secret virility presumably for shock value.

Brecht, something of a puritan, would doubtless have told Elliott to wash his mouth out, but the actor in question, Brian Charles Rooney, does very well in the circumstances, offering a performance the late Charles Ludlam might have applauded.

As Polly Peachum - the other lady in quest of Mack - Nellie McKay is charming in a gaga fashion, but is permitted to perform as if she were auditioning for "The Sound of Music."

Which brings us to the three possible reasons to see this weirdly misconceived production: Lauper as the forlorn whore Jenny, and Dale and Gasteyer as Mr. and Mrs. Peachum, Polly's parents - the criminal masterminds of Brecht's Victorian London.

Lauper, who gets to sing the opening number "Mack the Knife," which is normally given to a character simply called The Ballad Singer, seems perfect in this sleazy milieu and sings with a plaintive, Piaf-like chirpiness.

Gasteyer acts in a rigid style, presumably on instruction, but belts out her big number, "The Ballad of the Overwhelming Power of Sex," with undaunted vigor.

But the performance of the night - and surely one of the performances of the season - is 70-year-old Jim Dale as Mr. Peachum.

Drawing upon his six years of ballet training, his beginnings in English vaudeville, his years with Britain's National Theatre, and his even more years as a Broadway star, Dale, nimble, graceful, vulgar and funny, shows the world - and probably even the misguided Elliott - just what "The Threepenny Opera" is all about.

Perhaps he should just do it as a solo act.

Matthew Murray typically goes against what every other critic thinks. And he may have "got" this production, Bsobw, but I don't think he really gets Brecht - he alludes to certain things in his review that actually would indicate that Elliot DIDN'T serve Brecht well, though I don't think Murray is aware of that.