Brecht’s True Grit

There aren’t too many people who can tell you who wrote the librettos for the operas “La Boheme” or “Aida,” but countless theatergoers can provide the librettist for Kurt Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera.” It was playwright Bertolt Brecht.

Of course, Weill’s music has kept the piece popular since its debut in the 1920s in Berlin, but the various English translations of Brecht’s text have always left something to be desired. They made the story, based on John Gay’s 18th century “The Beggars’ Opera,” as light and breezy as Disney’s cuddly “Hunchback,” both as far from the original as they could possibly be.

Director Walton Jones, who has staged the opera to play in repertory at Glendale’s A Noise Within, has a particular interest as well as a personal historical attachment to the libretto he is using.

Jones studied at Yale Drama School in the early ‘70s, where he was fascinated by the lectures by professor Alois Nagler on the Weill-Brecht opera, and has since gone on to become one of the busiest directors around the country. Jones is perhaps best known as author and director of the popular “1940s Radio Hour,” which was nominated for a New York Drama Desk Award.

But when he finally got around to doing a version of “The Threepenny Opera,” he could not find a translation that worked for him. He picked up the most performed version by composer Marc Blitzstein. And he bought a recording of the hugely successful production, which starred Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya, which had a remarkable run when it opened at Greenwich Village’s Theatre de Lys in 1954. Then Jones went to another translation, by Eric Bentley.

Neither those translations nor the recording, Jones says, were anywhere close to what Nagler had talked about at Yale.

“It didn’t have the grit in it that Nagler had promised it would have,” Jones said. “He had told us that the original title, before it became ‘The Threepenny Opera,’ was a German word I don’t remember, that meant ‘scum’ or ‘filth.’ I knew that was certainly not the translations I’d been reading.”

Jones didn’t read German, but a former classmate of his, named Michael Feingold, did. And at Yale, Feingold had gone directly from Nagler’s lectures to the original German text. Almost a decade had passed, but when Jones contacted him, Feingold was intrigued by doing a new translation, one that would be closer to Brecht’s original.

The story of “Threepenny Opera,” which Weill and Brecht intended as a thinly veiled attack on the political and social climate in Germany in the mid-’20s, concerns cutthroat gangsters. In particular, there is the larcenous, evil Mack the Knife and the two women in his life, the raucous Jenny and the naive Polly.

In comparing the German text to the earlier English translations, Feingold was amazed at how the translations had strayed, said Jones, not only from Brecht’s text, but from the intent of Weill’s music, which was as gritty as the story.

“Kurt Weill,” Jones says, “established a new way of writing music, especially for theater, to have a dance band, essentially, performing an opera. That itself is an odd irony in juxtaposition. Which is what Brecht was all about. He loved contradiction. And that’s what Kurt Weill wrote, contradiction. It’s no wonder that they wrote together, and that they fought together. They fought endlessly, bloody, bloody battles.”

Michael Feingold and Walton Jones did not fight. In fact, when Feingold’s translation was the basis of a Broadway production in 1989, with rock star Sting as Mack the Knife, it was without Jones as director, but with his blessings.

But in this West Coast professional premiere--UC Irvine staged a college production of Feingold’s adaptation in 1992--Jones is performing what he calls “a labor of love.”

The grit will be there this time around, Jones said, and the ripe humor that Brecht couldn’t help inserting. He was a lover of vaudeville and burlesque. And the grit will be in the music. As Jones said, “If you try to soften it, you’re doing Weill an injustice.”

BE THERE

“The Threepenny Opera,” A Noise Within, 234 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale. Plays in rotating repertory with “The Winter’s Tale” and “So It Is! . . . If So it Seems To You.” Call theater for schedule. $20-$24. (818) 546-1924.