STAGE REVIEW : PTE Offers Luxuriant ‘Beggar’s Opera’

When John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera” opened at Rich’s Theatre in Lincoln’s Inn in January, 1728, wags said of its success that it made “Gay rich and Rich gay.”

It’s hard to see how the show’s current revival at the Pacific Theatre Ensemble’s hole-in-the-wall theater in Venice could make this company rich (they have roughly 40 people in the audience and 23 in the cast), but it is bringing wide grins and great bursts of laughter to its public.

That public has a better chance of being familiar with “Son of Beggar’s Opera” (a.k.a. Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Threepenny Opera,” derived from Gay’s original) than with “Beggar’s Opera.” The latter is seen far too infrequently. But if we needed evidence of its lasting relevance (tiresome word) and of the wisdom of reviving it, this staging abundantly provides it.

It is a rough and ribald sendup of corruption in Gay’s early 18th-Century London, taking as its figurative cast-of-thousands the thieves and thugs, fishwives and strumpets that peppered its underworld. These “cheats, hussies and highwaymen” provided Gay with the chance to invent the sleazy Peachums, wenching Macheath, plucky Polly, Lucy, Jenny and the lot. But if rakes and ruffians are the opera’s flesh and bones, the music is its blood.

J. Michael Alexander, a one-man band at a piano and electric keyboard that sounds just like a harpsichord, has adapted, arranged and performs the exquisite songs that are gamely and even boldly sung by this company of willing and able non-singers. Only Jacqueline Antaramian (Lucy), Carla Obert (Polly) and Michael Tulin (Matt) can be said to have real singing voices, but in the rowdy spirit of the staging and renegade context of the evening, it all works--even in the longer stretches of the later prison scenes that reasonably could do with some abbreviation.

Among the actors, Frank Collison triumphs over the wily Peachum, eyes popping, permanently astonished, and a curdled sneer under his long nose. Melissa Hoffman as his well-endowed, caterwauling Missus commands the stridency of amplified chalk on a board. The sly and mock-gallant Macheath is played by the debonair Robert Jacobs in as tongue-in-cheek and semi-dashing a manner as possible. Obert’s Polly is more minx than wanton, and as clever at sloughing off her awful parents as she is at locking horns with her archrival, the streetwise Lucy.

Under Stephanie Shroyer’s shrewd direction, this vivid disarray of characters is only part of the production’s impressive accomplishments. Costumes (by John Brandt, Lori Martin, Sarah Zinsser and Betsy Berenson) and makeup are comical and attentively detailed, while the show itself is mounted (and very well lit by Daniel Gordon) in every nook and cranny and on every level--floor to rafters--of the ensemble’s 17x45-foot storefront. Not since their mounting of “Slaughterhouse at Tanner’s Close” in Venice and later at Stages have they made such brilliant use of non-available space.

With every resourceful, undaunted, triumphant production of this improbable caliber, PTE edges closer to becoming the natural heir to Los Angeles’ defunct and much-mourned Company Theatre. Both were/are genuine ensembles, though the similarity beyond that is one of style rather than content. What the Company Theatre did so creatively in the early ‘70s on a 10-cent budget, PTE is doing now on about a $10 one and a lot of help from its friends.

Whereas the members of the Company let their imaginations roam free to invent such moonstruck marvels as “The Emergence,” PTE focuses on rousing, carefully detailed revivals like this one or such new mintings as its memorable “June Second,” a 1987 adaptation of the second part of William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury.” Many PTE members, as it turns out, are also products of the Donovan Marley glory days at the Pacific Conservatory for the Performing Arts in Santa Maria and Solvang. Apparently, theater families that stick together, play together. And then some.

An Open Festival event at 705 Venice Blvd. in Venice, Thursdays through Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Sept. 16. $12.50-$15; (213) 466-1767.

‘THE BEGGAR’S OPERA’

John Gay’s 18th-Century satire produced by Mary Seward McKeon for the Pacific Theatre Ensemble. Director Stephanie Shroyer. Assistant director Marilyn Fox. Scenic designers Steve Markus, Kevin McKeon, Kurt Wahlner. Lighting designer Daniel Gordon. Costumes John Brandt, Lori Martin, Sarah Zinsser, Betsy Berenson. Musical adaptation and arrangement J. Michael Alexander. Cast Vince Melocchi, Nicholas Cascone, Frank Collison, James Schultz, Melissa Hoffman, Carla Obert, Robert Jacobs, Sean Morrow, Michael Tulin, Peggy Maltby, Carol McLaine, Sylvie Massimi, Lisa Barnes, Kathryn Baron, Lisa Pettett, Kat Brown, Bill Evans, Jacqueline Antaramian, Marilyn Fox, Debra Goodfader, Janine Jorand, Julie Phillips.