When “The Threepenny Opera” returned to New York this spring, it is worth noting for several reasons, due to a visit to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
One would be homecoming. “Threepenny” was born in Berlin, a relic of Weimar culture, but was born in the music of Kurt Weill and the texts of Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, but there was a medieval revival at the level of a pop culture phenomenon. did. Broadway in 1954.
And it is done by Berliner Ensemble, founded by Brecht and still operated in the theatre where “Threepenny” premiered in 1928. New York Productions.
But most importantly in the run of this “Threepenny” presented by Bam and St. Ann's warehouse from April 3rd to 6th, it was the first real thing that New York audiences would see Director Barry Kosky's work. It means it will be an opportunity.
Kosky, 58, had once decorated his local playville once when the production of “The Magic Flute,” a 1927 collaboration with the company, came to the Mozart Festival in 2019, but he said, “Threepenny.” ” will become purely his own show. . This should come as a shock as Kosky is one of the busiest and most amazing, let alone the directors who work in Europe today.
He is a director achieved in theater and opera. His work could easily fit into Broadway and Metropolitan Opera, and the balance of intelligence and showmanship helped him breathe new life into both. This “Threepenny” gives him the opportunity to beat New York viewers. Have you seen the Imprezario?
Born in Australia, Kosky describes himself as a “gay, Jewish kangaroo.” His grandparents were European transplants from Budapest and Stettle, Belarus. His Hungarian grandmother instilled him in love with the operetta, writing in his book “The 'und vorhang auf, hallo!” or “'and column up, hello!”. It is a musical without much consideration of genres or hierarchies.
For him, “The Magic Flute” was “The Musical Mothership.” Mahler's symphonies were art, and so were the Simpsons. When he grew up, began acting and then began directing theatres, his artistry is informed by two other cultural artifacts: Kafka's writing and the “Muppets.”
They weren't that different, at least in his mind. Some Kafka stories are about the talking animals, and there is a cafkask in the never-ending struggle to continue the Kermit show. Both are reminiscent of Yiddish Theatre, as written by Kosky in his memoirs. Fozzie Bear is even a kind of sad Jewish clown. He thought “The Muppets” as “The Muppets” as Miss Piggy is the Queen of Rulers, flirting with Rudolf Nureyev on Steam Room, and plagued Gay, “Max Reinhardt meets Charlie Chaplin.” Masu.
It's sensational to Koski to say his aesthetic is Kafka and the “Muppet,” but if you watch his production with that in mind, it's accurate. His show doesn't have much realism. It tends to unfold like a dream. The room may not have walls. Comedy can be an irrational nightmare. Life could be endless vaudeville.
Koski's career bloomed in Australia and before it flourished in Europe, sometimes in Vienna, the Schauspierhaus and Komish were operating in Berlin. (He also had a champion in the US. The Met had planned to import Prokofiev's “fiery angels” production in 2020. It was cancelled due to the pandemic and rescheduled. It's no longer visible. A new piece with Bird's Fisher Center.) Through his project, you felt someone like Kermit and decided to do a good show. So even his weak productions still function well as theatre.
If anything, it's a thread passing through his stag. Some are maximalists, some are minimalist, but everything is theatrical and not always with their European peers. And while Koski's shows, like bold colours, have visual features, his work is more recognised for his sensibility. The audience can essentially rely on airtight logic no matter how hard his work is, and the organic freedom that comes from the rehearsals that the performers are thoroughly and intricately obsessed with rehearsals.
Like the best directors, Kosky also knows that different titles require different looks and dramatic gestures. In his book, he describes “Tosca” as an opera that seeks “thick oil paint and a wide range of brushes”, but something from Mozart or Janasek requires a “fine brush.” One of the widest canvas in the repertoire is Wagner's “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” This was performed by Kosky at the 2017 Bayreuth Festival.
“Meistersinger” contains four and a half hours of music, with pitfalls such as comedy, romance, anti-Semitic ratios, and in the final minutes, dark nationalist turns. Even more difficult is to stage it at Byrous, founded by Wagner and especially accompanied by a baggage of complex history as a destination for Hitler's favorite opera.
Kosky addressed everything directly from above. He set the first act within a replica of Warnfried, Wagner's home, where the composer was known to perform and sing through his opera scores. Kosky recreates one of those gatherings with characters from “Meistersinger” represented by real historic peoples like Cosima Wagner and his father Franz Liszt. He even included Wagner's Newfoundland dogs.
At first, the set design was extraordinarily realistic for Kosky. However, at the end of Act 1, the wall was lifted up, revealing the interior of the relatively cold courtroom of the Nuremberg trial. In Wagner's script, Act 2 concludes with a comedic riot caused by misunderstanding and an attack on Beck Messer, the character's villain, a teacher who was coded as a kind of Jewish outsider. Kosky's staging had some humor, but it was replaced by fear that suddenly started to look like Pogrom.
Everyone in the theatre felt like they were holding their breath as a huge anti-Semitic caricature based on “Eternal Jews” that bulged into the stage like Macy's Thanksgiving parade float. When it contracted and the curtains closed, the audience was provoked for the next hour's break.
Because of the nationalistic outcome, Kosky gave the character a monologue to Hans Sachs about “the art of sacred German.” As if to testify in Nuremberg, he was waving his fist with confidence while the court was empty and the orchestra of Feliniesk in black tie was caught in, he was waving his fist with confidence on stage to play the finale of joy. Was it a fantasy or a victory? The audience was left to decide to stand in the ju umpire.
Like the opera, Koskie staging was hardly easy. But it was clear, interesting, frightening, fun, and unforgettable.
He achieved a similar effect with Starker images. In the production of Janasek's “Kataka Kaba Nova” at the 2022 Salzburg Festival, the opera tragedy took action, before a naked stage and hundreds of mannequins. The action of “Fiddler on the Roof” began with Comicche Opera, but traveled to Chicago's Lyric Opera, which gushed out of his wardrobe and pile of wooden furniture.
“Fiddler” is far from the only musical that Kosky performed at Comicche Opera, a Berlin one-stop shop for operas, operettas and musical theatres. During his stay in 2022, which ended with a rough, three-hour show called “Barry Kosky's Yiddish Review of All Dance,” he was known as composers such as Paul Abraham, Oscar Strauss and Emmerich. The company's repertoire and excavated Opellets by revolutionizing the company's excavation of Opellets.
Kosky continues to direct with Komische Oper, where he is in the middle of planning to set five musicals there. He started with “La Cage Outs Folens.” This was a more epic treatment I've ever entered on Broadway, and I continued with “Chicago.” Last fall he directed “Sweeney Todd.” This initially appeared to have been done at the Victorian Toy Theatre, before opposing the image of the collapse of cities, including London during Thatcher's era. All of these were better than New York's latest counterparts.
Directing “Threepenny” in the 2021 sought the same pressure on “Meistersinger” work at Bayreuth. He had replaced chilly, musical productions by Robert Wilson, and “Threepenny” is hard, a beloved but incomplete job. In many cases, modern productions are upset by their humorless and influenced threes, as if they were “cabarets.”
But “Threepenny” is a nasty and dangerous and entertaining audience as tempted by Weill's Earworm Melodies before stabbing them with the scripted Barb by Brecht and Hauptmann. Kosky is more sensitive to the polyphonic structure of his staging than most directors, which moves around, repeats the material, trims and shows actively, lightly handed, and subtexts give it a bounty of its slippery pattern. It enables.
For those who grew up in Brecht as a carefully dull theatre provider, Kosky's approach may seem like a sacrifice. But in its impact, and in its showmanship, his “Three Penny” makes the unsettling magic it should do. You find yourself cheering for the narcissistic murderer in the name of Mac The Knife until the lights rise and you begin to relax your smile.
