The Sins of Annie

Mack the Knife, hero of Kurt Weil's Threepenny Opera, has become a hero of U.S. pop music in dozens of record incarnations, ranging from "Satchmo" Armstrong's growl to Tito Puente's Latin-beat version. Last week a distant cousin of Mack's was a smash hit on the stage of Manhattan's City Center. Her name was Annie, and actually--in an intriguing case of split personality--she was two girls. Annie I (Singer Lotte Lenya) stood for the heroine's practical, cynical self; Annie II (Dancer Allegra Kent) embodied her sentimental, well-meaning side. Between them, the two Annies made for a topnotch show--a sort of vaudeville-ballet-cabaret act that emerged, in its first U.S. production (staged by George Balanchine), as a typically Weilly immorality play.

Modesty Swaddled. As the story unfolded (libretto by the late Bertolt Brecht, in a new English translation by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman), The Seven Deadly Sins also turned out to be a lusty amalgam of the seven lively arts. As the two Annies leave home in Louisiana for "the great big cities where you go to make money," a family quartet (mamma is a booming bass) sits at stage right, chattering pious homilies ("Lazy Bones are for the Devil's stockpot"). With every remittance from the pilgrim Annies, they proudly add a new hunk to a fine brick house that is abuilding. The girls travel from city to city, and in each place they face one of the Sins in ironic disguise.

In Memphis, Annie II tries to dance in a nightclub, modestly swaddled, but soon learns from practical Annie I that "pride is [for those] who can well afford it. Do what you are asked to do and not what you want." Annie II quickly un-swaddles, becomes a notorious nude enclosed in cellophane. In Los Angeles, she loses a movie job when she gives way to Anger at the brutal director (bleats her family: "We're at a standstill!"). In Philadelphia, where her dancer's contract specifies that she must weigh 118 lbs.. she fights Gluttony by frenetic, deep knee-bends, and Annie I keeps her from a tempting ice-cream cone at pistol point. In Boston, Annie has a nicely paying lover, but succumbs to Lust by falling in love on the side with a handsome pimp (cries Annie I: "Cheat the man who protects you, and you've lost half your value").

Fetchingly Stripped. After seven years the house is paid for, but Annie II faces the consequences: envy of those who live naturally without thought of gain. In the San Francisco finale, she is stripped symbolically (and fetchingly) to black lace undies, tries to plunge through a series of doors representing instincts that she rejected. Barred by a chorus line in spangled bras and chilling, dehumanized masks, she goes home to the crushing arms of her family, a sadder and possibly wiser Annie.

Singer Lotte Lenya, Composer Weill's widow, chanted the English lyrics over the plonking, honky-tonk score with the shrugging mock quavers and smoky, wistful quality that she commands as gracefully as ever. Young (21) pretty Ballerina Kent managed to convey both futility and hectic gaiety with a lift of her head a swaying lilt of her lithe body.

The Seven Deadly Sins is a period piece --the last collaboration (1933) between Refugee Berliners Weill and Brecht. The first went on to compose hit Broadway musicals, the other to be a literary showpiece for Communist Germany. Both are now dead. Their 1930s' cynicism, which is actually full of sentimentality and humor, survives as a work of satirical art that neither matched again.

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