Where There’s an Order to the Chaos

“Happy End” did not have a happy beginning. Inspired by the huge success of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera,” that work’s producer hoped to entice an immediate successor from the same creative team and performers. But Brecht, in high Marxist dander, was willfully uncooperative--insulting actors, inserting an irrelevant last-minute role for his wife, ignoring deadlines. In the unhappy end, the playwright contributed only the song lyrics and left the book about the Salvation Army and Chicago gangsters to his associate, Elisabeth Hauptmann, to complete. The original production in 1929 closed within a week, not to be revived for nearly 30 years.

Still, Brecht and Weill, even at their most contentious, were great innovators, and “Happy End” is not entirely hopeless. The music is strong, and three Brecht/Weill numbers--the “Bilbao Song,” “Surabaya-Johnny” and the “Sailors’ Tango”--are groundbreaking crossover classics that elevate cabaret song to narrative aria. And various modern attempts to come to terms with “Happy End,” from Michael Feingold’s English-language Broadway-ized version to whittled-down versions of the original in German, have met with varying degrees of success.

So why not now add a dose of postmodern performance art to this problematic work? That is exactly what “Happy End” gets in a radical, messy, multidisciplinary production presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art. MOCA might seem a strange place for Los Angeles to kick off the Kurt Weill centenary, but somebody should, and no one else seems eager. Moreover, MOCA has a crucial legacy of producing noted experimental multimedia performance, and it has, at the Geffen Contemporary, the best space in town in which to do so.

That space, in this case the Sharon and Thurston Twigg-Smith Gallery, is an inspiration. Every inch of it--and there are a lot of inches in this lofty aerie--is used with imagination. Audience and performers are mobile. Stages and players move about here and there, and we follow, turning on our stools. Our eyes move up and down--up to marvel as actors climb fearlessly high on the rafters.

In a statement in the program, the director, Randee Trabitz, asks many questions about breaking down theater’s walls, about reclaiming ownership of art, about sincerity and credibility, about revering music in the theater, about archetypes. It is to both the advantage and disadvantage of “Happy End” that she answers none of them in her production but rather tosses confusion about like confetti.

Even though Trabitz uses the narrative-oriented Feingold version, the atmosphere is circus-like, the story fractured. One moment there is an (unfortunately) amateurish shadow play, the next a dramatically interesting interaction between actors on video and live. Films are projected on curtains and screens--one is a sendup of old silents and includes amusing cameos of Angelyne, Monty Hall, Mike Kelly, Lydia Lunch, Leonard Nimoy, Rachel Rosenthal and (as a remarkable good sport) Richard Riordan. There are puppets and stuffed animals. There are stills. There is an adequate eight-member band led by Joseph Bernardi. There are masks (rats and sheep are a motif).

And there is performance artist-chanteuse Weba Garretson in the crucial Lotte Lenya role of Lillian Holiday, the Salvation Army lieutenant who falls in love with gangster Bill Cracker (the similarity with “Guys and Dolls” is apparently coincidental). Garretson is the firm center of the theatrical chaos. She has a limited but effective voice and knows how to use it to put across text and emotion. The sheer athleticism of the production means a certain loss of musical freedom--it’s hard not to sound rigid when balancing on high beams with the band seemingly miles away down below--but Garretson’s sheer theatrical exhilaration at breaking boundaries is more than enough compensation.

Dan Gerrity (Bill Cracker), Chris Wells (Captain Hannibal Jackson and Major Stone) and Elizabeth Ruscio (Miriam, the Governor, the Cap) proved good-natured actors, keeping up a manic pace of changing costumes and personas, though none were comfortable singers. The elaborate low-tech/high-tech production needed a large technical staff, and there seemed the inevitable glitches in keeping audience and actors, projectors, lights and whole stages mobile.

Then again, maybe they weren’t glitches. No one seems too concerned about making sense out of “Happy End,” and thus the production’s inventive mess becomes its most endearing quality. Indeed, here we have a good example of just the wonderful disorder that not only characterized the adventure of the Brecht and Weill theatrical collaboration but made it possible.

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* “Happy End” continues through March 5, the Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., $13-$15. (213) 621-1752.