Word: stagings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...late spring in 1980. Throughout France, unemployed workers stage factory sit-ins. Thousands of squatters move into unoccupied buildings. Corsica and Brittany are veritable battlegrounds as separatists intensify terrorist campaigns. The unrest stems from widespread disenchantment with President Valery Giscard d'Estaing's economic policy, which has produced record levels of inflation and unemployment. At 2 a.m. on May 20, a telephone rings in the Elysee Palace. "This is not a joke," says a stern voice. "Please warn the President that if by 6 a.m. he has not freed the Corsican and Breton fighters arrested two days...
...CHARACTERS on the seedy stage of the Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill Threepenny Opera look out for themselves. An effective production of the unique hybrid of cabaret song, Broadway show, and revolutionary tract should leave you asking yourself whether you're any different. Brecht's script keeps up a steady fire of political comment, and his socialism slips in discreetly enough so that even American audiences in the '50s could stomach it. But it's Weill's brooding, often harsh music--so evocative of Weimar Germany's rotten core--that fixes The Threepenny Opera's world of human iniquity and mortality...
They come closest to it at the very beginning. As the light go up, cast members in rags spill out over the stage area and into the audience, assaulting, abusing, fondling, pickpocketing and beating each other. Here is Brecht's London writ small, and the streetsinger (Kermit Norris) croons the familiar "Mack the Knife" over it. But for some reason his costume has no tatters, and his delivery of the ballad is prim and affected. So much for anarchy and dissipation...
...decades since he first appeared, Macheath--he of the white gloves, cane and jackknife--has become a stage favorite. The king of the underworld who's best friends with the chief of police strides through The Threepenny, Opera refusing to be judged. Women, of course, fall all over him, and he's married two (at least). Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, the "king of the beggars," a less familiar character, acts as Brecht's mouthpiece to deliver the show's straight-forward message: don't condemn how others earn their next meal until you're faced with missing one yourself. Working, begging...
Other performers in the Caravan production are obviously talented but don't even try to be sordid. You would be glad to have Ida Beecher's Mrs. Peachum as your grandmother; she plays the kind old lady to perfection, but brings an element of benevolence onto Brecht's stage that doesn't belong there...