The Threepenny Opera

Marcus David
May 2025

Audiences will be delighted to see the all too short run of The Threepenny Opera in Brooklyn directed by Barrie Kosky and presented by BAM and St. Ann’s Warehouse at the Howard Gilman Opera House.

The Threepenny Opera has a long and powerful history. Having  premiered at the Berliner Ensemble in 1928, it still manages to pack a punch with social criticisms that seem just as relevant today as they were during the Weimar Republic and director Barrie Kosky and music director Adam Benzwi push these dark themes both visually and sonically making this wonderful production shine.

“Firstly, Brecht and Weill were experimenting with theatrical and musical language. There hadn’t been a piece quite like this before. That range between what the text is doing and what the music is doing is what makes it so fantastic. Finding a way in which you can do this tango between the intellectually cerebral satirical sarcasm of Brecht’s text with the beautiful, often melancholic yearning of Kurt Weill’s music,” says Kosky of the production’s main challenge.

The staging of this production is quite simple with a jungle gym style of design that offers the actors plenty of climbing opportunities into vertical space. Kosky himself also encouraged his cast to break the fourth wall at any time and directly engage the audience as a way to warm things in the house and create a welcoming atmosphere akin to a vaudeville experience.

And of course there is the star of the show, Mack the Knife, our wonderful anti hero Amoral, sinister and violent to the core, but with an abundance of charm that seduces us all, this corrupt character has captured the imagination of successive generations since his inception back in 1928. One of the production’s highlights is, of course, “The Ballad of Mack the Knife” (German: “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer”). This clever last minute addition to the score by Kurt Weill is based on a Medieval murder ballad, a Morität. (mori = death, tät = deed) which would have been sung by strolling minstrels, and over time this little piece of music has proved to have incredibly long legs as it is now considered standard repertoire by a variety of performers. Americans probably are most familiar with significantly brighter versions of the tune covered by Louis Armstrong in 1955 and Bobby Darren in 1959.

In this production Gabriel Schneider brings wild energy and blood drenched horror to the old Macheath role with a vibe similar to what Jack Nicholson did in Stanley Kubrick’s film version of The Shining (1980).

Kosky does offer us the satisfaction of seeing Macheath hang in dramatic fashion, even if it is for just a little bit, but as so often is the case with wickedness, it prevails. And it is only when the lights come up that we realize  we have been rooting for a murdering sociopathic criminal the whole time, but we can always square this confusion by reminding ourselves that it was a lot of fun.

The Threepenny Opera
April 3 – April 6, 2025

Berliner Ensemble
Based on John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera
Lyrics by Bertolt Brecht
Music by Kurt Weill
in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann
Music Direction by Adam Benzwi
Directed by Barrie Kosky