Word: weills
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Brecht and Weill are so well-known for Threepenny Opera that their other masterpieces are often ignored. Sarah Caldwell is presenting The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The libretto, as bitter as any Brecht ever did, concerns a city whose only crime is if you cannot pay. Too bad most of us cannot pay for the tickets: the ones left are from $10 to $18. The sensible way to see Boston Opera Company productions is to enroll in their open-rehearsal subscription series...
...real jewel of the season promises to be Kurt Weill's great Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which the Boston Opera is producing in the spring. Mahagonny has a Brecht libretto about the building of the capitalist paradise, the City of Nets, where everyone can do whatever he likes as long as he can pay for it. Mahogonny's best-known number is probably the Alabama-Song, one of two songs Brecht wrote in English, which the Doors popularized a few years ago. But there's so much great, furious music in Mahogonny that it's hard...
...band as a featured act, but she also kept up her new attachment to the theater. She played both Hippolyta and Titania in a West End production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hedda Gabler at Canterbury, and replaced an ailing Lotte Lenya in a production of the Weill-Brecht The Seven Deadly Sins in Edinburgh. Currently she is starring in a London revival of Show Boat, where her breathy, pulsating Bill is a showboat-stopper. Her musically adventurous nature has also led her to give lieder recitals, try some of Dankworth's offbeat settings of Shakespeare Sonnets...
...Threepenny Opera. A fine pedigree, extanding from John Gey's 18th Century original. The Begger's Opera, to its adaptation by Bertoit Brecht and Kurt Weill in the twenties, comes through the excellent Leverett House production unbesmirched. The Old Library Theatre sees a bit of the ultra-violence as the Knife spills the opera's good Mend freely. Here comes a big, but there goes the neighborhood...
...Leverett House production is not perfect by any means, but gets a small boost from Peter Agoo's set--consisting largely of bundles of hay--that is versatile and funny. Ultimately, though, it's what Brecht says that is important and Weill's music comes through triumphantly, making The Threepenny Opera a masterpiece...