Latest from West Edge gets stuck in traffic
“The Threepenny Opera” isn’t a misnomer, exactly, but the piece does strain at the usual genre boundaries. It’s a play with songs, sort of, or a comic opera with spoken dialogue, or a piece of unclassifiable street theater transferred inhouse. Who can say, really? The matter is hard to pin down — intentionally so — and those tensions come out in full flower in the alarmingly limp and unfocused production that is currently part of the West Edge Opera’s summer season. On Sunday, Aug. 11, at the company’s grimly inhospitable venue by the side of the Bay Bridge toll plaza, “Threepenny” dragged itself out through nearly three hours without having much of interest to offer on the subject of opera, or beggars, or the universal systems of oppression, injustice and brutality by which humanity continues to eat itself alive.
You’d think that in our day and age, these subjects of Brecht and Weill’s great 1928 collaboration would be live topics, ripe for inventive exploration. But this production, staged with dull predictability by director Elkhanah Pulitzer and delivered with only intermittent musical success under the leadership of conductor David Möschler, seems intent on picking the lowhanging fruit at every turn.
Scene after scene plays out in the most obvious theatrical vein. The whores and beggars who occupy the piece’s seamy Victorian underworld are clad in shabby rags, fishnets and garters; they loll about indolently like holloweyed club kids on a toot, or else pronounce Brecht’s tart witticisms with underlines and exclamation points so no one misses the sociopolitical critique.
And although Weill’s score is studded with some of his most sparkling and wellknown songs — “The Ballad of Mackie Messer,” “Pirate Jenny,” the exquisitely paradoxical “Barbara Song” — too
“The Threepenny Opera”: 8:30 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 15. West Edge Opera. $19-$125. Bridge Yard, 210 Burma Road, Oakland. 510-841-1903. www.westedge opera.org many of them emerged sounding tentative and underrehearsed.
That problem, in fact, extended to many aspects of the production. Sunday’s was the second of three performances in a run that had commenced on Aug. 3, yet it often felt like a rehearsal from two weeks before opening. Lines were flubbed, pacing was hesitant, and a show that should crackle with electricity sagged constantly.
Derek Chester’s wan, flavorless performance as the silkily erotic crime boss Macheath didn’t help matters, but in this context, even skilled performers could find themselves out of their element. Sopranos Maya Kherani and Erin O’Meally both sang beautifully as Polly Peachum and Lucy Brown — two of Macheath’s string of wives — but seemed to have been cut adrift during their extended spoken scenes.
Sarah Coit was a splendid presence as the prostitute Jenny Diver, singing with a robustness that matched the character’s fearlessness, and there were vigorous, thoughtful performances from Jonathan Spencer as Mr. Peachum — the ringmaster of London’s beggar population — and Robert Stafford as the police chief Tiger Brown.
But the heroic star of the proceedings — and this is a sentence I’ve written so many times over the years that it should be a macro on my computer — was the magnificent mezzosoprano Catherine Cook as Mrs. Peachum.
Cook showed how to give Weill’s music its full due without sacrificing any of the script’s satiric bite, especially in an account of “Ballad of Sexual Dependency” with a winning blend of swagger and tonal richness. Her comic pacing was impeccable — while everyone else on stage swam through an apparent rhythmic void, she delivered every line and every take with crisp exactitude. There’s nothing she can’t transform into pure delight.