Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Barrie Kosky’s heightened staging of THE THREEPENNY OPERA brings danger and seduction to the classic

• By drediman
• April 8, 2025
• No Comments

This past weekend, I had the great opportunity to catch the storied Berliner Ensemble’s acclaimed revival of The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Co-presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and St. Ann’s Warehouse, the production is notable for at long last introducing American audiences to the work of director Barrie Kosky, an auteur theater director who, for a number of years now, has been making a big splash with his adventurous global stage productions. As such, there was an air of “an event” — increasingly less of an occurrence these days — as I walked into the sold out BAM Howard Gilman Opera House to take my seat.

What’s striking about the piece is how, about a century after having been first performed in Weimar Germany, it continues to have the potency to shock and unsettle. Visually, the first thing you’ll notice about the dark but playful production is the influence of legendary experimental theater director Robert Wilson — from the saturated lighting to the stylized expressionism of it all (the set is a series of vertical towers that ingeniously form a vertical sculptural representation of the labyrinthine streets of London). But what Kosky has so brilliantly done is to set aside Wilson’s typical cool rigor, instead opting to heighten the work’s cynicism, grotesqueness, and absurdity. The result is a caustic and audacious theatrical experience that’s fueled by unhinged emotion and rampant moral corruption. Indeed, this Berliner Ensemble production of The Threepenny Opera has brought newfound urgency and relevancy to the bleak worldview of the work, its scathing critique of society and human nature as tangible and as deep-cutting as it’s ever been.

Kosky has elicited some extreme, uninhibited performances — which often break the fourth wall — from his sensational cast, who largely perform the show in German (with English titles), occasionally augmenting the text with amusing improvised asides in English. There’s considerable seduction and danger in these performances (at times I feared for their safety), particularly the magnetic Gabriel Schneider in the central role of Mackie Messer (i.e., “Mack the Knife”). Although not quite the strongest singers, their raw phrasing of Weill’s slicing songs felt completely in line with Kosky’s alluring, maximalist production.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

THE THREEPENNY OPERA
Off-Broadway, Musical
Brooklyn Academy of Music
3 hours (with one intermission)
Closed