A Threepenny Opera Con Brio

Photo by Kevin Thomas Garcia

Productions of The Threepenny Opera usually stumble over the paradox that though it’s a great play, technically it’s not a very good one. The script by Bertolt Brecht is massively overwritten, with long passages of dialogue that no translation from the German (I’ve encountered several) has succeeded in rendering without awkwardness. The comic scenes may have been partly improvised in rehearsal when the show was first mounted in Berlin in 1928, or else Brecht may have built them around the vaudevillian talents of his cast; now the exchanges between the gangster Macheath (Mack the Knife) and his gang, Mackie and his pal, Chief of Police Tiger Brown, Brown and Jonathan Peachum, the ruthless boss of all of London’s beggars, and Peachum and his equally devious wife just sit on the page, challenging actors to figure out how to make them funny. Yet the play, a raucous social satire that updates John Gay’s eighteenth-century satirical burlesque The Beggar’s Opera, is vibrant, theatrical to the gills, and every time the action pauses for one of Brecht and Kurt Weill’s songs, you know you’re watching and listening to one of the signal achievements in modern theatre. Weill’s music is thrilling: glittering and acid, robust and plaintive, simultaneously redolent of the music hall, the salon and the jazz club.

New York, New York: Stepping Around the Heart of Scorsese’s Movie Musical

 The wonderful "Wine and Peaches" number in New York, New York. (Photo: Paul Kolnik)

Martin Scorsese’s 1977 New York, New York, perhaps the only Big Band musical film after the collapse of the Big Band era, is about the meeting – collision is more accurate – of two young musical hopefuls in Manhattan on V-J Day, both newly out of the service. Jimmy Doyle (Robert De Niro, at the end of his astonishing early career – the year after Taxi Driver) is a relentlessly confident saxophonist and Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli, in her least-known great performance) is a vocalist. He keeps asking her out; she keeps telling him no. But his persistence, obnoxious as it sometimes gets, is inseparable from his charm, and though she tries to resist she ends up acceding to every one of his demands. She does go out with him, she lands him a job by performing a duet with him at an audition – it’s “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me,” and they’re a knockout together (Georgie Auld, who plays a supporting role, dubs Jimmy’s sax) – and they become lovers, then husband and wife. You’d have to be De Niro to pull off this part. The marriage is a disaster, because Jimmy is demonically focused on his career and professionally competitive, and when Francine doesn’t – or can’t – do exactly what he demands of her, he steams. And he cheats on her. The divergence in their careers – she becomes a star of stage and movie musicals, he becomes one of the inventors of bop – operates as a symbol for all the ways in which their relationship is unworkable.