Word: mackli
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From early sound epics featuring Johnny Mack Brown to Arthur Penn's The Left-Handed Gun, there have been many attempts to dramatize either the inglorious life or the tarnished legend of William H. Bonney-otherwise known as Billy the Kid. Dirty Little Billy, however, is the first to deal with Billy while he is still literally a kid, a punk adolescent just learning to shoot, to booze, to whore and to stay up past midnight. Billy is an eager pupil...
...become happy, lyrical jazz just before they turn irretrievably sour. The opera's overture--a sort of bitter chorale in which the saxophones seems to be playing Bach just a little out of tune--sets the mood, and then things really get underway with the Moritat, better known as "Mack the Knife." If you have only heard Mantovani versions, you can have no idea what bite this song has. Stephen Schmidt, the conductor, puts it across beautifully, although the band has an occasional ragged moment later...
...OPERA'S second-best-known song is "Pirate Jenny," probably the most beautiful expression of venomous hate ever written. The song is about its singer's dream of killing everyone the knows. Nancy Frangione, the cast's standout as Polly, the latest of Mack the Knife's brides, manages to squeeze out all the song's acid lyricism without imitating Lotts Lenye. The other female leads--especially Deirdre Carson as Jenny Drive--are nearly as good...
...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...