Old Beggar in Manhattan

One summer night in 1928, first nighters crowded into a Berlin theater to see Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), composed by a young highbrow named Kurt Weill on a text by a proletarian poet named Bert Brecht. Nobody thought it would last more than a few performances. How could an eight-piece orchestra and a tatterdemalion cast compete with the great music dramas of Wagner and the moderns? But two years later, Threepenny Opera was still running, and since then it has had thousands of performances, including a handful in the U.S. Last week it was revived in Manhattan's tiny (300-seat) Theater de Lys, with new English words by Composer-Librettist Marc Blitzstein.

The scene is a tawdry section of Dickensian London. The characters are dregs of the town, led by an enterpriser named Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, who has managed to organize beggary and make it pay, and one Macheath, thief and trollopmonger. ("Sloppy Sadie was discovered/ With a knife-wound up her thigh/ And Macheath strolls down on Dock Street/ Looking dreamy at the sky.")

Faded Waltzes. The plot takes Macheath through a fake marriage with pretty Polly Peachum, two betrayals by one of his earlier loves, and right up to the moment of his execution--when he is saved by a royal pardon. Beaten into the mixture of bawdry and cynicism are a couple of bitter speeches of social protest, written in a heavy Teutonic style that even Blitzstein's tart translation could not leaven.

The 22 musical numbers recall German cafe music of the hungry '20s. The artfully threadbare orchestration gives them a kind of tawdry elegance, as of faded Viennese waltzes with indecisive endings. Among the best: Pirate Jenny, appealingly rasped by Composer Weill's widow, Lotte Lenya,* dreaming of an escape from drudgery by joining a pirate crew; the Ballad of Dependency, in which Comedienne Charlotte Rae derides Macheath's virility.

Still Alive. Threepenny Opera's pedigree is two centuries old. Its original was The Beggar's Opera, John Gay's satire on the Italian operas of his day. Gay's comedy turned out to be the smash hit of the 18th century, so popular that it forced London's chief composer of Italian opera, George Frederick Handel, to shutter his own fashionable opera house and ultimately turn to writing oratorios. The Weill version took little but the characters from John Gay, was itself a satire on grandiose German operas. It so inflamed musical conservatives in Berlin that students rioted and stoned the theater where it was playing.

Manhattan's new version is neither a smash hit nor a matter for riot. It sometimes bogs down in prosy prose and amateurish acting. But the enthusiasm of audiences for Weill's score shows there's life in the old beggar yet.

* Who created the role of Jenny a quarter century ago.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.