Sexuality Explored
Five minutes before the house lights dimmed, my partner, who loves theater but has never seen a Bertolt Brecht play, asked what The Threepenny Opera is about. My first impulse was vaudevillian shtick: "about two and a half hours, dear." Instead, I suggested he find out for himself.
How fortunate that this revival is so strident, brazen and aggressive. It isn't the most pungent example of Brecht's epic theater philosophy-he used the German word Verfremdungseffekt, which we render as "alienation effect"-but it's as good a Threepenny as mainstream Broadway is likely to see.
Brecht drew upon John Gay's 1728 satire The Beggar's Opera as source material, resetting the story in Victorian London when he and composer Kurt Weill wrote Threepenny in 1928. Macheath (Alan Cumming) leads a gang of thugs and thieves, an arresting antihero less emblematic of social decrepitude than as a messenger delivering a metaphorical question: What is morality? Cumming also plays him as a sadomasochistic prick-Tony Soprano's libido on the Autobahn.
Mack marries Polly Peachum (Nellie McKay), a waif draped in white, to the chagrin of her father, Mr. Peachum (Jim Dale), a feckless libertine who controls London's beggars. With Mrs. Peachum (Ana Gasteyer), he conspires to have Mack hanged, but Mack's best friend is Tiger Brown (Christopher Innvar), the police chief, so he escapes jail, only to be re-arrested thanks to a betrayal by Jenny (Cyndi Lauper), a whore with a heart of tin, Mack's true love.
Since whole forests have been consumed printing dissertations on Brecht's class-driven agenda, let's focus on director Scott Elliott, who consistently turns Threepenny into a ribald sexual fantasia. In Wallace Shawn's profanity-rich new translation, Mack not only exudes sex-he's already knocked up the police chief's daughter, Lucy Brown (Brian Charles Rooney)-but Lucy's not even a girl, as some of Elliott's cruder staging reveals.
Still, when Rooney sings "The Jealousy Duet" (with Polly) and "Lucy's Aria" (solo), he hits notes so unearthly high you're sure there's a dub somewhere, some track overlaid atop the actor's charismatic lip-synch. But that's his voice-and Rooney's spectacular performance allows Elliott to ask us a second question: What is sexuality? The director's casting includes drag queens, trannies and quasi-sexual bitches-Hattie Hathaway, aka Brian Butterick; Edie, aka Christopher Kenney; Flotilla DeBarge, aka Kevin Rennard-although the buff Innvar, appearing briefly at one point in tight gold lame briefs, pretty much makes the statement right there.
The leads are a mixed bag. As Jenny, Lauper plays it very hardscrabble New Yawk and does a neat job with "Solomon's Song." Cumming, meanwhile, better make Mack the last time he plays a sex fiend. He did it when Roundabout revived Cabaret (also at Studio 54, winning him a Tony) and once again when Roundabout revived Nöel Coward's Design for Living. Raspy of voice and rakish of attitude, he is still a dynamic Scottish colt, but his persona has become a one-trick, horse-hung pony, at least as emphasized by Isaac Mizrahi's too-snug costumes. Opposite Cumming, McKay sparkles: she is as clear-voiced, sweet and purebred as Polly should be. As Mrs. Peachum, Ana Gasteyer looks like one of Tony Soprano's ex-girlfriends and has one singing mode-loud and over-amplified.
Finally, Jim Dale's Mr. Peachum is a sly dog, drizzled into the musical's fetid social soup for cash, power and revenge against Mack. In Brecht's brand of bitter irony, however, his songs are mostly music hall, and that's why Dale, who began his career as a song and dance man in his native Britain, is such inspired casting. "Peachum's Morning Hymn," "Certain Things Make Our Life Impossible" and "The Song of Inadequacy of Human Striving"-again and again he transforms a production top-heavy with message, including the signage Brecht demanded, into thoroughly rapt entertainment.