Much too nice
The Threepenny Opera
Music by Kurt Weill. Text by Bertolt Brecht
Director: Chris Johnson
Musical Director: Michael Morley
Suncorp Theatre, Brisbane
Until June 10
Reviewed by Dave Riley
Before Hair and The Rocky Horror Picture Show was Die Dreigroschenoper — the notorious Threepenny Opera. With its Berlin premiere in 1928, modern musical theatre was severely shaken. Here was a low life burlesque that chose to be as crude as the bawdiest of cabarets.
But shock was not its only mark. Weill's musical score, with its mixture of jazz and sometimes atonal melodies, complemented a modern parable that sarcastically represented capitalism as a den of thieves. As musicals go, The Threepenny Opera was as radical as they come.
Unfortunately, with this production you wouldn't know it. While the music under Michael Morley's direction is a faithful rendering of Weill's original score, the performers do not fare as well.
The most annoying feature — a true disaster — is the inability of the actors to make themselves heard over the din of the orchestra that shares the stage with them. Since the point of the play relies on the lyrics of the songs the audience simply cannot understand the logic of the performance before them. Hopefully, this is a technical problem which can be corrected early enough in the season for the production to recover.
But aside from that, this production lacks guts. The play's coarse cynicism has been toned down. This should be a disjointed and episodic satire that verges on political revue, but Chris Johnson seems to have failed to enliven her actors with a bold confidence to project their performances beyond the footlights. With a few exceptions — Robert Alexander's Macheath, Susie French's Jenny and Christen O'Leary's Lucy — this is shy theatre.
Thus reticent, it fails to deal with the immense anger projected onto the lives we are forced to lead. Georgie Parker's Polly, for instance, a figure who calculates her chances by always referring back to No 1, is here presented like Goldilocks skipping merrily through villainy. Such niceness is just too much.
It is a pity that Brecht, at least, has not been better served. All the hard work on stage by such a large ensemble of skilled actors should be more fruitful than this. When performers address the audience directly, there is a hint of the potential that lies in the work. If only its robust energy had been tapped.