The Threepenny Opera” was one of the key plays to secure the important reputations of playwright Bertolt Brecht (with help from mistress Elisabeth Hauptman, whom history has conveniently ignored) and composer Kurt Weill in the theater world. Artistically, it is a work that entertains and provokes the audience with its critique on bourgeois society. This year the UCSD music department will present a sort of stripped-down, updated version of “Threepenny” at the Che Cafe. Graduate students Nick DeMaison, Rick Burkhardt and Andy Gricevich contrived the idea and directed the play and music. The original play was a critical and commercial success in late 1920s Germany, just before the rise of Hitler.
The main crux of the play, which reflects industrial societies such as Germany itself, is perhaps best described by philosophy student and co-director Gricevich, who said, “A lot of things that are thought of as crime are, at bottom, business, and on the other hand most of what’s thought of as business is basically crime.”
For example, one of the main heroes, Mac the Knife, is the anti-hero: a pimp, thief and murderer. The play is filled with crime and poverty and the reaction of the middle class to these events. Naturally, this characteristic was a shock for 1920s Germany, contributing to the play’s commercial success.
The role of the anti-hero, however, has been played out in our times, and thus the original play has lost some of its shock value. After all, what young person doesn’t have a favorite gangsta rapper to look up to? With this in mind, composition student, translator and co-director Burkhart has cranked up the crude language and sexually suggestive scenes. His translation sparks with 21st-century oomph. He has, however, kept the main essence of Brecht’s work intact.
Brecht is a towering figure in 20th-century German theater. He and Weill shared dissatisfaction with the status of theater in Weimar Germany. They were sick of high art in German society and the upper-middle class it was tailored to. Thus, instead of providing the typical contemporary atonal music one expects from serious works, the music of “Threepenny” is in the low-art style of cabaret music.
Weill is best known for musical soundtracks. DeMaison, a composition graduate student, arranged Weill’s music for an ensemble of six musicians, instead of the original 15. Weill’s music in “Threepenny,” in a style of 1920s German cabaret, reflects the blue-collar banality of that lifestyle. On the other hand, the music is strong enough to transcend these negative attributes and is surprisingly listenable. Weill’s arrangement of such simpleminded music is over the top and stuffy, but DeMaison’s stripped-down version makes the music a lot more enjoyable. Of course, Weill intended the music to be over the top and lame, mocking the excessive lifestyle of the bourgeoisie that the play criticizes.
The combination of music and theater often signals to American audiences the stereotypical “musical sound,” but “Threepenny” predates the time when the genre was milked dry in post-World War II Hollywood. Weill’s music, although highly accessible and “popular” in style, can be easily appreciated by high-art enthusiasts. DeMaison sees American musicals as weak in comparison.
“I think the problem with a lot of American musicals is that they want to be high art, but they want to appeal to everybody and are caught in this awkward, horrible middle ground of really awful everything,” he said. Weill’s music lacks these pretensions.
This combination of Weill’s low-art music with Brecht’s cynical critique and satire on capitalist society makes “The Threepenny Opera” a fun and disturbing study of humankind. “The Threepenny Opera” will play at the Che Cafe May 27 at 8 p.m.
