‘Brechtian’ -- but fun

AT a recent rehearsal of his new production of Kurt Weill’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” for Los Angeles Opera, British director John Doyle is busily breaking down the fourth wall.

Looking beach-resort cool in an aqua sweater and cream slacks, Doyle appears out of place as he strolls among ragtag cast members toting suitcases and wiping imaginary sweat from their brows as they trudge like weary Ellis Island immigrants into Mahagonny, a new city in the Old West that promises the glitter of gold.

Also somewhat out of place but for a different reason are cast members Audra McDonald and Patti LuPone, Tony winners more associated with Broadway stardom than the opera stage, sharing top billing with tenor Anthony Dean Griffey, who portrays the doomed Jimmy Macintyre. Other distinguished opera performers in the cast include Donnie Ray Albert, Mel Ulrich and Robert Worle.

Contrary to accepted conventions of the theater, Doyle is instructing his players to break character to let the audience in on the artifice when another cast member is the focus of attention.

In fact, he tells the chorus line of women portraying Mahagonny’s very available prostitutes that it’s OK to look a bit distracted, maybe even a little resentful, when Jenny Smith, the hooker portrayed by McDonald, is selling herself with a song -- just like real performers waiting their turn at a cattle call.

“Show that this is playacting,” suggests the even-tempered Doyle, whose comments always seem less stage direction than polite request. “Let’s bring a little bit of the dressing room onto the stage.”

Doyle also wants the characters to play everything bigger than big; he surprises Worle, the suitably plus-sized tenor who essays the role of Fatty the Bookkeeper, with the suggestion: “You can be fatter.”

“Do it bigger” is the kind of direction that represents pure catnip to LuPone, who stars as the amoral madam Leocadia Begbick. This diminutive performer often ends up in larger-than-life roles -- Eva Peron in “Evita,” Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard” -- and she appears eager to take things over the top again as she belts out her character’s get-rich-quick philosophy: “It’s easier getting gold out of men than out of rivers.”

When Doyle asks the cast to try emoting as though playing the largest theater they can possibly think of, LuPone hollers back: “Well, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is no shrinking violet!” The home of L.A. Opera seats about 3,000.

Doyle predicts that not everyone will appreciate his take on Weill’s 1930 opera “Mahagonny,” the dark tale of how lust for money causes the downfall of a new city and its denizens. The libretto is by Bertolt Brecht, whose three-year creative partnership with Weill also resulted in “The Threepenny Opera,” and during a lunch break, Doyle says that he’s trying to do Brecht without being, well, Brechtian.

“I know if I read that something is Brechtian, I think, ‘Oh, I’m not going, it’ll be dreary,’ ” Doyle says, invoking his favorite word for what theater should never be. “But it really is about breaking the fourth wall, telling us what we’re about to watch. Musical theater and opera are such heightened form -- I mean, you and I are not sitting here singing arias at each other. The director should take advantage of that.

“But you should still be emotionally involved. There’s a danger of thinking that about Brecht: ‘Oh, I don’t get emotionally involved,’ and I don’t think that’s good theater.

“Yes, it is presentational, it is simple, and the performer knows the audience is there. It has a certain element of being declamatory. It has maybe street theater and circus theater influences, rather than just being influenced by the theater of Ibsen and Chekhov. It’s vital and sexy and alive. I see a danger in getting too much involved in it as a philosophy.”

In fact, his fourth-wall-blasting “Brechtian” approach in his recent Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” was born not of adherence to a philosophy but of necessity. “We didn’t have much money,” he says. In that stripped-down, small-cast production, which won Doyle his first Tony for musical direction, the cast also served as the band. Picture LuPone, who played Mrs. Lovett, purveyor of meat pies made of human hamburger, playing the tuba.

Making an impression

L.A. Opera general director Placido Domingo says it was “Sweeney Todd” that led the opera company to Doyle. “His amazing attention to both the musical and the dramatic aspects of that production convinced us that he would be the ideal choice as a director,” Domingo says.

Not everyone was similarly impressed, Doyle acknowledges. “I get ‘How dare you’ letters: ‘How dare you do that to Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece?’ ” he says, sounding quite pleased by the fact. “Well, Stephen Sondheim was in the room. The point of the theater is that you explore the story differently every single time.”

At least, that’s the point of theater for Doyle, whose current Broadway revival of the Sondheim-George Furth musical “Company” also calls for actors to serve as the orchestra. “I’m known for my reinventions,” he says, with massive understatement.

“Here we are, three Broadway Tony winners -- Audra four times over -- coming into an opera environment, and that’s happening more and more,” Doyle muses. “It brings very interesting -- not culture clashes, that’s far too strong a word -- but it’s a different use of language.”

And, he adds, “Mahagonny” is “a hybrid. You could say it’s an opera, you could argue that it’s a musical, you could say that it’s a Brechtian play in the middle of all this glorious music. So somebody who comes from a more straight theater environment might be helpful.”

Doyle bites back at those who might call themselves theater or opera “purists” by calling them “fundamentalists” instead. “We’re trying to free that, to challenge that,” he observes.

Besides breaking the fourth wall in “Mahagonny,” Doyle’s production will also break historical walls by setting the action in three periods of recent history: Weill’s own era, post-World War I, the Las Vegas of the 1950s and the present.

“This piece was written before the Second World War; well, we can’t not be influenced by what has happened since,” Doyle says. “I think if we simply staged an authentic 1920s Brechtian production, we could end up with a fairly dreary night out.”

Creating the transition falls mainly into the hands of set designer Mark Bailey and costume designer Ann Hould-Ward. As is her usual practice, Hould-Ward has created for one wall of the rehearsal space a collage of images that served as her inspiration, hoping that the performers will benefit from this glimpse into her mind, a melange that includes many images of powerful or seductive women, including Condoleezza Rice, Scarlett O’Hara, Josephine Baker and Paris Hilton.

“Once John selected the periods, I started out with artists who have a relationship to the periods, artists who made major statements in the same way Brecht and Weill were making them -- big, big statements,” Hould-Ward says.

For the time of Weill, Hould-Ward chose George Grosz and Otto Dix, German artists working post-World War I and capturing on canvas not the glory of war but its horrors as well as the social decadence that followed. For the 1950s, era of the Rat Pack, she selected Chicago artist Ivan Albright, noted for images of darkness and decay; in 1943 the artist was commissioned to create the title painting for Albert Lewin’s film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

Finally, for the modern section, she studied British Expressionist painter Francis Bacon.

“When you look at his paintings, it’s really in the faces where the pieces are starting to move in manipulation. Looking at those paintings it’s hard to see the human being,” she says. “And that’s what’s happening to Jimmy, the fact that when his money is gone, there is no more place for him there.”

For their part, the performers are enjoying being part of an opera-theater hybrid. Both LuPone and McDonald, frequent collaborators, like that Weill’s work fuses elements of many musical styles.

LuPone adds that she also signed on because she is a former Juilliard classmate of L.A. Opera music director James Conlon. “I’m not supposed to call him Jimmy; I’m supposed to call him maestro,” she cracks.

The singers also praise Doyle’s staging for defying the parameters of old-school opera presentation, the sort that might see singers frequently standing still and projecting their voices directly to the audience, rather than participating in the action onstage -- as McDonald calls it, the “park and bark.”

Soprano McDonald performed in 2006 at Houston Grand Opera in a double bill of Poulenc’s “La Voix Humaine” and the world premiere of John LaChiusa’s “Send” and showed her operatic talents even on Broadway in her Tony-winning role of an aspiring singer studying under diva Maria Callas in “Master Class.” Still, she prefers playing the field with musicals, concert performances and acting roles in film and TV.

“I’m very happy sort of hopping around,” she says. “I go where the specific work takes me.”

LuPone has played the role of Callas in “Master Class” and last year appeared in the premiere of Jake Heggie’s opera “To Hell and Back.” Still, she is quick to admit, “Audra has an opera voice, and I have a musical theater voice.”

She too is no great fan of park-and-bark performances. “That’s why most opera is boring,” exclaims LuPone, who says she is bringing some drama to her role by patterning her character, Begbick, after Sante Kimes, an American woman infamous for murdering New York socialite Irene Silverman as well as a business associate of her husband’s. She wanted, she says, to find a murderess who was not just a male’s accomplice but who called the shots.

Griffey, a creature of the opera who does a lot of outreach to bring opera into the classroom, points out that this branch of the performing arts is so unfamiliar to most kids that when he writes the word “opera” on the blackboard, students often exclaim: “It’s Oprah!”

Singers and storytellers

FOR Griffey, who once aspired to be a minister, anything that makes opera more accessible is welcome news. That’s one reason he gravitates toward operas performed in English; this “Mahagonny” is an English translation from the original German.

“I don’t get into labels. I just like to call myself a singer; I don’t classify myself as Broadway or opera,” says Griffey, who shares a Juilliard school bond with McDonald: He was McDonald’s classmate and her upstairs neighbor in an apartment building during their student years. “I would love to do Broadway or movies, because I think that bridges the gap and connects us all,” Griffey says.

Although the performers and the director think the opera world could take pointers from Broadway, Doyle admits he’s not as much attracted to shows that are all showbiz. “I wouldn’t want you to think for a moment that I wouldn’t enjoy doing ‘42nd Street.’ I would,” Doyle says. “But my real love and passion is in challenging the audience: How can we all be better?

“It doesn’t matter to me whether it’s opera, musical theater or straight theater, it’s the storytelling that matters. What are we trying to say?”

diane.haithman@latimes.com

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‘Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’

Where: Los Angeles Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday and Feb. 14, 17, 22 and March 1; 2 p.m. Feb. 25 and March 4

Price: $30 to $220

Contact: (213) 972-8001 or www.laopera.com