Word: brecht
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Once in a while, one may notice a similar visibility problem in the Leverett House production of the opera, but Weill's music and Bertolt Brecht's words ultimately triumph over all obstacles...
...most important obstacle is determined overacting during the first two acts, in which we most the opera's seedy underworld characters. Histrionics are fine and director. Charles Langmuir uses them to good effect, in the big crowd scenes where Brecht attacks society's corruption directly. But in more intimate scenes, where the attack is subtler, the acting ought to be more delicate...
...third act, when Brecht pulls out all the stops the posturing of Peter Kazaras, who plays Mack the Knife, becomes appropriate and effective. Mack is to be hanged. His friend, the police commissioner, is powerless, terrified at a beggar king's threats to send an army of professional paupers to disrupt Queen Victoria's coronation unless Mack is executed. Kazaras rises to the occasion. "What is the robbing of a bank to the founding of one?" he asks. A mounted messenger promptly rushes up to knight him, though Brecht reassures us that real life would not have come...
Threepenny Opera. Music by Friedrich Weil, libretto by Bertoldt Brecht and production by Leverett House. It should be a winning combination. "Mack the Knife" is Richard Nixon's favorite song...
While the Berlin section of the evening is less well done, it is more meaningful because Weill's collaborator was Bertolt Brecht. Between them they fashioned a dramatic rhetoric of music and lyrics that moved with deceptive ease from the beat of the goose step to the glide of the tango. Decadence was their target, but they were half in love with what they hated; Weill could decant sin from a saxophone. The music that he later composed in the U.S. somehow lacks that moral bite that Brecht inspired...