‘Threepenny’ Veteran Returns

Charles Rome Smith has had a recurring nightmare for at least 20 years. It goes like this: He’s directing a production of “The Threepenny Opera’--but on opening night, the cast fails to show up.

“Talk about being haunted by a production,” Smith said.

He’ll see if his dream comes true Thursday, when his staging of the classic musical by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill opens at Theatre West.

This will hardly be Smith’s first opening night with “The Threepenny Opera.” He was on the stage of Theatre de Lys in New York’s Greenwich Village on March 10, 1954, when a now-legendary production of “Threepenny” opened.

Featuring Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya, the young Beatrice Arthur and a new translation by Marc Blitzstein, the production ran for 95 performances before it was forced to close because of a prior booking. But the clamor for a return visit, led by New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson, was so intense that the show reopened Sept. 20, 1955, and stayed for more than six years--the longest run of a musical in America up to that point.

It was an unlikely show to establish such a record in the Eisenhower era. Based on the 18th century “The Beggar’s Opera” by John Gay, “Threepenny” is a sharp-tongued satire of corruption and capitalism, in which criminals and prostitutes are some of the leading characters.

The success of the show was a seminal rite of passage for the fledgling off-Broadway theater scene, proving that Manhattan’s smaller theaters could serve as hospitable homes for dark material that never could have sustained such a long run on Broadway. And beyond New York, the influence of the show entered the broader culture, thanks to the widespread success of its most popular song, “Mack the Knife,” named after the show’s dashing antihero Macheath. The original cast album was recently released on CD.

Smith was with the production throughout its history--first as an actor in the role of a jail warden, later as a production stage manager who directed 165 of the cast replacements and also played roles himself in emergencies, and again as an actor for a year in the role of the Street Singer, who opens the show with the famous lines:

Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear

And he shows them pearly white

Just a jackknife has Macheath, dear,

And he keeps it out of sight.

Smith’s staging will attempt to replicate the Theatre de Lys production at Theatre West as much as possible, although the two theaters differ in their physical configuration. Most of the blocking of the show is “self-evident,” Smith said, but he will credit the 1954 director and co-producer, Carmen Capalbo, in the program.

“I have complete faith in him,” Capalbo said by telephone from his home in New York. “He knows this production intimately.”

Smith said that the look of the show, “as if it’s put together by a bunch of beggars,” will ring true for anyone who saw the New York production. “It will have an improvisational, minimalist look only achieved by the ‘Our Gang’ comedies.” However, there will be one new visual touch: footlights befitting the play’s 1837 setting, which Smith said will give his show “a framework of something different from what you normally see.”

For budgetary reasons, Smith’s production’s musical accompaniment will be provided by a single pianist. The off-Broadway staging had an eight-piece band. The current licensing agent of the Blitzstein adaptation--the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization--adheres to Lenya’s decree that the show feature either all eight musicians or only one pianist, but nothing in between.

Smith was a self-described “kid fresh out of the Army” when he became involved with “Threepenny,” and it proved to be a godsend in terms of its relative security--’better than unemployment insurance,” Smith recalled. He had arrived in New York from Springfield, Ill., carrying his belongings in a trailer in back of an old Dodge, in November 1953. After a brief stint running the holiday train display at Gimbel’s department store, he was cast in the show in January 1954.

To some extent, he credits his youthful “beanpole” physique with getting the job. He was 6 foot 3 and weighed only 135 pounds--’I was thin enough to be the decadent warden.” Also, “I was nonunion, and they were allowed to use a certain number of nonunion actors,” paying wages of $5 a week for rehearsals and $15 a week for performances. Smith was more interested in backstage duties than he was in acting, and he worked with the same production company on other projects after the first run of “Threepenny” closed. But he was glad to return to the show in 1955.

Smith remembers Lenya well. The younger actors listened wide-eyed to Lenya’s tales from the show’s original production in Germany in 1928. She told them that Nazi brownshirts had tried to drown out the voices of the actors. And because the blacklist was thriving in New York in the early ‘50s--Brecht himself had endured a round with Washington interrogators before leaving America in 1947--the actors wondered if they would be targeted for association with Brecht’s left-wing views. “It was bruited about that we were all being listed somewhere by the FBI,” Smith said.

When Smith’s Midwestern mother visited New York, “she understood most of the play, but she was really interested in Lenya, who was so exotic to her.” The two women wound up sharing cookie recipes.

“Threepenny” became one of New York’s hottest tickets--an example of “radical chic” before the term was coined a couple of decades later. “You’d see people pulling up in Rolls-Royces, wearing minks,” Smith said. “Bourgeois New Yorkers, the fat and the well-fed, were fascinated by the whores, the beggars and the criminals” in the show.

When the production moved west, Smith went along, serving behind the scenes in a brief San Francisco run and then for three months in 1960 at L.A.’s Music Box, a long-since-razed theater at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue. After the show finally closed in New York, he moved west permanently, thanks to a romance with a girlfriend who purportedly had Hollywood connections. Those didn’t pan out, but Smith stayed in L.A. and has amassed many L.A. and off-Broadway stage directing credits over the decades, including a long association with the stage adaptations of Ray Bradbury’s works.

The Theatre West production is actually Smith’s second attempt to direct “Threepenny.” In 1973, as a member of the Actors Studio Directors Unit, he was hired to stage “Threepenny’--and then fired, replaced by Lee Grant. He contends that some of the Method-trained Actors Studio board members didn’t understand Brecht.

Smith cited the importance that Brecht placed on “not letting the audience get too involved with their emotions” at the expense of more rational thought processes. The Method, by contrast, emphasizes the recall of emotion.

Though he hasn’t kept up with more recent translations and productions of “Threepenny,” Smith believes the show is as relevant as ever. “Selling each other out is what the play is about. Money controls everything. It’s about the expediency of survival--and people are still fascinated by that. Look at ‘Survivor.”’

Look also, he said, at the Rampart Division police scandal and the homeless who still camp out on the streets of L.A., prototypes of which are reflected in the play. He quotes Macheath’s speech as he’s being led to the gallows: “We little handicraft workers and safecrackers ... we are being submerged by the large concerns. What is a jimmy in the hand, beside a handful of stocks and bonds? What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” It may sound like “standard socialist cant,” Smith said, “but on the other hand, look how we are being submerged by large corporations.”

Smith harbors no illusions that his own production will take off and run for six years. “We’d need a sugar daddy with big bucks for that to happen,” he said--which sounds like the kind of economic imperative that might have interested Brecht himself.

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“THE THREEPENNY OPERA,” Theatre West, 3333 Cahuenga Blvd. West. Dates: Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends June 13. Price: $25. Phone: (323) 851-7977.