When “The Threepenny Opera” returns to New York this spring, for an all-too-brief go to to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it will likely be notable for a number of causes.
For one, it will likely be a homecoming. Though “Threepenny” was born in Berlin, an artifact of Weimar-era tradition, with music by Kurt Weill and textual content by Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, it had a midcentury resurgence on the extent of a pop-culture phenomenon when it was revived Off Broadway in 1954.
And it will likely be carried out by the Berliner Ensemble, which was based by Brecht and nonetheless operates out of the theater the place “Threepenny” had its premiere in 1928. The group is a reliable custodian of a piece that’s typically mishandled immediately, particularly in current New York productions.
However what’s most necessary about this run of “Threepenny,” introduced by BAM and St. Ann’s Warehouse April 3 by way of 6, is that it will likely be the primary actual alternative for New York audiences to see the work of the director Barrie Kosky.
Although Kosky, 58, graced native playbills as soon as earlier than, when his manufacturing of “The Magic Flute,” a collaboration with the corporate 1927, got here to the Principally Mozart Pageant in 2019, “Threepenny” would be the first present that’s purely his personal. Which ought to come as a shock, since Kosky is among the busiest and most good, to not point out entertaining, administrators working in Europe immediately.
He’s a director achieved in theater and opera. His work might match simply on Broadway and on the Metropolitan Opera, with a steadiness of intelligence and showmanship that will breathe new life into each. This “Threepenny” shall be a possibility for him to win over New York audiences. Will impresarios be watching?
Born in Australia, Kosky has described himself as a “homosexual, Jewish kangaroo.” His grandparents had been European transplants who got here from Budapest and the shtetls of Belarus. His grandmother from Hungary instilled in him a love of operetta, he wrote in his e book “‘Und Vorhang auf, Hallo!,’” or “‘And Curtain Up, Howdy!’” He ended up creating a ardour for classical music, operas and musicals with out a lot regard for style or hierarchy.
To him, “The Magic Flute” was the “mom ship of the musical.” Mahler’s symphonies had been artwork, and so was “The Simpsons.” As he grew up, and started to carry out in after which direct theater, his artistry was knowledgeable, he likes to say, by two different cultural artifacts: Kafka’s writing and “The Muppets.”
They weren’t so completely different, a minimum of in his thoughts. A number of Kafka tales are about speaking animals, and there’s something Kafkaesque in Kermit’s unending wrestle to maintain his present going. Each, Kosky wrote in his memoir, are paying homage to Yiddish theater; Fozzie Bear is even a sort of unhappy Jewish clown. He considered “The Muppets” as “a queer house” during which Miss Piggy was the reigning drag queen, flirting with Rudolf Nureyev in a steam room and tormenting Kermit, a homosexual “Max Reinhardt meets Charlie Chaplin.”
It’s sensational for Kosky to say that his aesthetic is Kafka and “The Muppets,” however for those who watch his productions with that in thoughts, it’s correct. There’s hardly a hint of realism in his reveals, which are inclined to unfold all through dreamscapes. A room might not have a wall; comedy might change into irrationally nightmarish; life may be an limitless vaudeville.
Kosky’s profession bloomed in Australia earlier than flourishing in Europe, with tenures operating the Schauspielhaus in Vienna and the Komische Oper in Berlin. (He has additionally had champions in the USA. The Met had deliberate to import his manufacturing of Prokofiev’s “The Fiery Angel” in 2020. It was canceled due to the pandemic, with no rescheduling in sight. Upstate, nonetheless, he’s creating a brand new work with the Fisher Middle at Bard.) All through his tasks you sense somebody, like Kermit, decided to placed on a great present. That’s the reason even his weaker productions nonetheless operate nicely as theater.
If something, that’s the thread by way of his stagings. Some are maximalist and a few are minimalist, however all are theatrical, which isn’t at all times the case along with his friends in Europe. And whereas there are visible hallmarks to a Kosky present, like daring colours, his work is extra recognizable for its sensibility: Viewers members can depend on nearly hermetic logic, irrespective of how zany his work might seem, they usually can anticipate performers to behave with the natural freedom that comes from thorough, detail-obsessed rehearsals.
Like the most effective of administrators, Kosky additionally is aware of that completely different titles name for various appears to be like and dramatic gestures. In his e book he describes “Tosca” as an opera that requires “thick oil paint and a broad brush,” whereas one thing by Mozart or Janacek requires “a effective brush.” One of many broadest canvases within the repertoire is Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” which Kosky staged on the Bayreuth Pageant in 2017. The manufacturing encapsulated his bravery, wit and appeal.
“Meistersinger” incorporates over 4 and a half hours of music, with pitfalls all through: comedy, romance, antisemitic tropes and, within the last minutes, a darkly nationalistic flip. Much more troublesome is staging it at Bayreuth, which was based by Wagner and comes with the luggage of difficult historical past, not least as a favourite opera vacation spot of Hitler’s.
Kosky addressed all that head-on. He set the primary act inside a duplicate of Wahnfried, Wagner’s dwelling, the place the composer was identified to play and sing by way of his opera scores. Kosky recreated a type of gatherings, with “Meistersinger” characters represented by actual, historic folks like Cosima Wagner and her father, Franz Liszt. He even included Wagner’s Newfoundland canine.
At first, the set design was unusually real looking for Kosky. However on the finish of Act One, the partitions had been pulled as much as reveal the comparatively chilly courtroom inside of the Nuremberg trials. In Wagner’s libretto, the second act closes with a comedic riot sparked by a misunderstanding and an assault on the character Beckmesser, a pedantic villain coded as a sort of Jewish outsider. There was humor in Kosky’s staging, nevertheless it was changed by horror at what instantly began to appear to be a pogrom.
It felt as if everybody within the theater was holding their breath as an unlimited antisemitic caricature based mostly on “The Everlasting Jew” inflated onstage like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float. Because it deflated and the curtain closed, the viewers was left with a provocation for the hourlong intermission that adopted.
For the nationalistic ending, Kosky had the character Hans Sachs ship his monologue about “holy German artwork” as if testifying at Nuremberg, shaking his fists with conviction because the courtroom emptied and he was left alone whereas a Fellini-esque orchestra in black tie rolled onstage to play the jubilant finale. Was it delusion or triumph? The viewers was left to resolve, a stand-in for the jury.
Just like the opera, Kosky’s staging was hardly easy. However it was clear, humorous but terrifying, pleasant after which haunting.
He has achieved comparable results with starker pictures. In his manufacturing of Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova” on the Salzburg Pageant in 2022, the opera’s tragedy unfolded each on a naked stage and earlier than a whole bunch of mannequins with their backs turned on the motion. The motion of his “Fiddler on the Roof,” which originated on the Komische Oper however has traveled to Lyric Opera of Chicago, springs from a stack of wardrobes and picket furnishings.
“Fiddler” is way from the one musical that Kosky has staged on the Komische Oper, a one-stop store in Berlin for opera, operetta and musical theater. Throughout his time there, which led to 2022 with a delirious, three-hour present referred to as “Barrie Kosky’s All-Singing, All-Dancing Yiddish Revue,” he revolutionized the corporate’s repertoire and unearthed operettas by composers like Paul Abraham, Oscar Straus and Emmerich Kalman.
Kosky continues to direct on the Komische Oper, and he’s halfway by way of a plan to stage 5 musicals there. He started with “La Cage aux Folles,” in a gayer, grander therapy than it ever obtained on Broadway, and continued with “Chicago,” freed from Fosse clichés and heavy on razzle-dazzle. Final fall he directed “Sweeney Todd,” which at first appeared to happen in a Victorian toy theater earlier than unfolding in opposition to pictures of city decay, together with in Thatcher-era London. All these had been higher than their most up-to-date counterparts in New York.
Directing “Threepenny,” on the storied Berliner Ensemble in 2021, had comparable pressures to the “Meistersinger” job at Bayreuth. He was changing the chilly, unmusical manufacturing by Robert Wilson, and “Threepenny,” a beloved however imperfect work, is troublesome. Too typically, trendy productions are slowed down by humorlessness and affected sleaze, as if it had been “Cabaret.”
However “Threepenny” is filthily hilarious and dangerously entertaining, daring audiences to be seduced by Weill’s earworm melodies earlier than stinging them with the barbs of Brecht and Hauptmann’s script. Kosky, greater than most administrators, is delicate to its polyphonic construction in his staging, which strikes round, repeats and trims materials all through to make the present transfer briskly and with a light-weight hand, permitting the subtext its slithering grace.
For individuals who had been introduced up on Brecht as a purveyor of deliberatively blunt theater, Kosky’s strategy could appear sacrilegious. However in its affability, its showmanship, his “Threepenny” works the unsettling magic it ought to. It’s not till the lights come up, and you start to chill out your smile, that you just understand you had been simply cheering for a narcissistic assassin by the identify of Mack the Knife.
