Word: peachum
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...every season at La Piccola Scala (La Scala's intimate, 700-seat annex, specializing in rarely done or light operas). Elsewhere, she has shown her great versatility by singing everything from Mozart's Requiem (under Bruno Walter), to a TV performance of The Merry Widow, to Polly Peachum in Weill's Threepenny Opera. Soprano Sciutti is married to a former operatic bass from Seattle named Bob Wahoski, who long ago abandoned music to form his own European Travel Service, which ferries U.S. tourists through Europe in Cadillacs. If the tours sometimes seem eccentric, there is a reason...
...most basic plot revisions are of the end of the movie. The gallows scene and reprieve are cut, and instead Mack the Knife escapes from jail and becomes the head of a prominent banking house which Polly has bought for him. He takes as partners Polly's father, old Peachum, the organizer of London's beggars, and Tiger Brown, who has been deposed as London's police chief. Both of these old criminals have been stripped of their respectability by an enormous demonstration put on by thousands of crippled beggars during Queen Victoria's coronation parade...
...some reason, has fewer songs, and its mockery of capitalism is more savagely direct. The stage play rewards the outlaw Mack the Knife for his evil deeds merely with a title and a pension; in the film. Mackie Messer (Rudolph Forster) becomes the director of a bank. As Peachum's beggars prepare to break up a coronation parade (Threepenny Opera owes its inspiration to John Gay's Beggar's Opera, and the scene is London), someone remarks: "The rich have hard hearts -but weak nerves." The line is pure Brecht. He devoted his life to rattling those...
Thus all that the cast must do is sing properly some of the loveliest airs ever written, and, with a few minor exceptions, this they all do. There is little to be said about Shirley Jones as Polly Peachum; I can not conceive of the role's ever having been played any better. Jack Cassidy, a bold and dashing Macheath, lacks the noble voice of Miss Jones, but sings most pleasingly. George Irving triumphs as scheming Mr. Peachum; both in his comedy bits and arias he is Peachum as Gay must have envisioned him. Zamah Cunningham as his wife, however...
...vintage rotgut to travel. The "chamber orchestra" of the august Vienna State Opera bravely buckles down to the hurdy-gurdy score with its plinky-plink banjos, but it is played with excruciating slowness. The star is a charming Viennese nightclub chanteuse named Liane, who sounds less like Polly Peachum than an operetta shopgirl mooning over an archduke. The record does have its high spots, notably the duet between the prostitute Jenny and her pimp. To a wistful tango melody they...