Word: bellucci
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WHEN JOHN BELLUCCI '81-4 was a freshman, he played Hotspur in a Loeb Mainstage production of Henry IV Part I. "I had this great choreographed fight at the end with Prince Hall," he remembers. "We would go at it with these enormous magnesium swords really grunting and groaning and making it look like we were falling down all over the place, until finally he killed...
Some of the brilliances are to be expected. John Bellucci as Mac the Knife, for instance, turns in a performance steaming with violence and malice, and the Weill songs, despite some weakness in the orchestra, wound and horrify as they must. But there are other, less conventional strengths, each illuminating enough of the production to carry it past awkward moments. Lars Gunnar-Wigemark, snarling and slobbering as he narrates, inspires awe and terror even when he enters unexpectedly carrying a bright pink can of Tab; and Martha Hackett as Jenny, Macheath's favorite whore, provides the evening's most gripping...
...production. The Second Threepenny Finale: What Keeps Mankind Alive?, which closes the second act, encapsulates the message of the play, "Food is the first thing. Morals follow on." Rarely has the persistence of man's struggle against man been so strikingly captured with words and music. The strength of Bellucci and Hackett, addressing the audience with this particular account of original sin, is electrifying. Nothing more is needed to drive the message through the spectator's heart than the voices of the hardened tart and her procurer, accusing yet beseeching, against the panorama of human misery. Tempted to condemn them...
Captain Macheath (John Bellucci), known as Mac the Knife, holds sway over the criminal elements. He marries Peachum's daughter Polly (Daphne de Marneffe), without her parents' consent. Enraged, Peachum and his wife (Miriam Shmir) plot to have him hanged. Mrs. Peachum enlists the help of Mac's whores to trap him, one of whom, Low-Dive Jenny (Martha Hackett) once lived with him. Mr. Peachum bullies Tiger Brown (Christopher Randolph), the Sheriff of London and Mac's old army buddy, to arrest Macheath...
...John Bellucci's Macheath is frequently too endearing a rogue. Bellucci fails to put sufficient distance between Macheath and the audience, even when addressing them directly, as in the Cannon Song, a duet Macheath sings with Tiger Brown. Bellucci's classical, stylized acting makes Macheath an adventurer, a guise sympathetic to the audience. But the actor strengthens in the second half of the opera, after Macheath has made his decision to visit the whores on Thursday as usual, knowing the police are after him. He acquires the stature that comes with a man headed compulsively to his doom: Bellucci dispenses...