LOS ANGELES:

Variety

Norris

Born out of Germany’s economic meltdown in the 1920s, “The Threepenny Opera” puts the destitute and desperate onstage — a remarkable thing at the time. Rather than refresh its reality for our own financial crisis, director Rufus Norris and playwright Simon Stephens turn it into a (three) penny dreadful, as keystone cops chase red-striped robbers and Marvelous villains take on the system. Now playing at the National Theater, it’s a classy production — too classy to make Brecht’s case for the poor. Instead, it goes after art, the way popular drama tends to fetishize lowlifes and misfits.

Given a brusque update by Stephens, pockmarked with genital jokes and other crudities, this “Threepenny” lands in London — specifically, the last remnants of the old East End. Rory Kinnear’s Macheath, his sleepless eyes red raw, might look like a banker in his bowler hat and pinstripe suit, but he snarls like a gangster prowling his patch. There’s no glamor about him, nor any joy. He kills for a living; no more, no less. We judge at our peril: “We can’t have ethics that we can’t afford,” he scowls our way.

That might be Brecht’s point — that capitalism contains its own corruption — but this is too lavish a production to really stand by it. Vicki Mortimer’s design, a grubby sideshow of historical London, is poor theater on a big budget. All those old flyropes and brown paper flats aren’t revealing the mechanics, but faking them for that louche Weimar look. Norris deploys the staple Brechtian techniques — characters squawk “scene change” to move things along — but they come laced with irony, all knowingly naive. Props gets self-evident labels; signs set each scene. It’s basically pastiche, one big epic spoof. This is straight-up entertainment: Brecht