Perplexing, Yet Glorious ‘Threepenny Opera’

The Reprise! concert series exists to remind us that, for instance, the “Ballad of Mack the Knife” comes not from Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra or a McDonald’s commercial, but from a glorious musical show.

That jaunty old song, returned to its measured tempos and its cabaret-band instrumentation, is one of the treats of the current Reprise! offering at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s lacerating study of moral decay in 1928’s “The Threepenny Opera.”

The Reprise! concerts get just brief windows for rehearsal, and performers are put onstage--scripts in hand--with simple but evocative blocking and choreography. Under Glenn Casale’s direction, the semi-staged performance didn’t come off as smoothly at Wednesday’s opening as some of Reprise’s previous resurrections of little-staged musicals. But while pacing lagged in the dialogue scenes, the music was often glorious.

Top to bottom, the talent here is extraordinary. We get not only the likes of Patrick Cassidy (off-Broadway’s “Assassins”) and Theodore Bikel (numerous “Fiddler on the Roofs”) in the leads, but Hal Robinson (the aging vocal instructor in “Old Wicked Songs”) and Sean Smith (Anatoly in L.A.’s “Chess”) in small supporting roles.

The 30-year-old Brecht and 28-year-old Weill based their show on British writer John Gay’s 18th century “The Beggar’s Opera.” Writing in Germany as Hitler advanced on the horizon like a roiling storm cloud, they depicted a hellish world in which money is the great corrupter, the family is cradle of all bad behavior and, sooner or later, sex gets most everyone into trouble (an angle that drew big laughs on the day three dozen boxes of special prosecutor findings about President Clinton were delivered to Congress).

This isn’t musical comedy, it’s musical satire--and it is quite different from what we Americans have come to expect from the musical theater.

What’s more, this is one of Brecht’s early experiments with distancing effects. He wanted his viewers to truly think about what they were seeing and hearing, not be swept brainlessly along in a tide of emotion. So he incorporated elements that repeatedly jarred viewers out of their reveries (notice, for instance, how Weill’s perky melodies are set in ironic opposition to Brecht’s gloomy lyrics).

Given the rehearsal constraints, Casale and musical director Peter Matz have made admirable progress in re-creating Brecht’s style. The acting is pushed to near-melodramatic extremes; key lines are addressed directly to the audience; and when dialogue is interrupted by song, the lighting shifts abruptly and the music begins and ends rather sharply.

Still, the unfamiliar performing style, combined with several unintentionally rough edges, makes this a perplexing theatergoing experience.

Cassidy is positively devilish as master thief Macheath--his skin painted white and his eye sockets darkened so that his face becomes an evil, sneering skull. He uses his incisive baritone to great effect, practically spitting his words. Bikel, who has become so identified as the upstanding Tevye, is that character’s antithesis as J.J. Peachum, who has bullied London’s beggars into a corporate syndicate. It’s a shock, to say the least.

Ken Page, probably best known from Broadway’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” is the story’s narrator, delivering the “Ballad of Mack the Knife” in a velvet voice.

The women, though, are this production’s most dynamic singers. Jonelle Allen delivers the gritty “Pirate Jenny” with equal amounts of defiance and terrified surrender. Tears glisten in her eyes by song’s end. Carrie Hamilton uses her driving, dusky voice to cunning effect in the “Barbara Song,” prompting such vociferous applause that the show comes to a halt, and she and Marguerite MacIntyre engage in a deliciously fierce cat fight in “Jealousy Duet.”

* “The Threepenny Opera,” Freud Playhouse, UCLA campus, enter Hilgard Avenue at Wyton Drive, Westwood. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m; matinees Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m.; this Sunday only, 7 p.m. Ends Sept. 20. $45-$50. (310) 825-2101, (213) 365-3500. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes.

Theodore Bikel: J.J. Peachum

Marilynn Lovell: Mrs. Peachum

Marguerite MacIntyre: Polly Peachum

Patrick Cassidy: Macheath

Ken Page: A Street Singer

Jonelle Allen: Jenny

Carrie Hamilton: Lucy Brown

A Reprise! production. Book and lyrics by Bertolt Brecht; music by Kurt Weill; English translation by Marc Blitzstein. Directed by Glenn Casale. Musical direction by Peter Matz. Choreographed by Kay Cole. Set: Bradley Kaye. Costumes: David R. Zyla. Lights: Tom Ruzika.