Top revivals of two classics—Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera and Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard—are being performed in Brooklyn this month.
The Threepenny Opera is being presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music by BAM and St. Ann’s Warehouse through April 6, while The Cherry Orchard, a new version of the play by Benedict Andrews that originally ran at the Donmar Warehouse in London, will be offered at St. Ann’s Warehouse through April 27.
16 December 2019, Berlin: Oliver Reese (l-r), artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble, conductor Adam Benzwi and Barrie Kosky, director and artistic director of the Komische Oper Berlin, will be at a press conference at the Berliner Ensemble. Kosky stages a new production of the Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill at the Berliner Ensemble. The premiere will be celebrated in early 2021. Photo: Bernd von Jutrczenka/dpa (Photo by Bernd von Jutrczenka/picture alliance via Getty Images)
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The production of Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera was created by director Barrie Kosky; it is performed by the Berliner Ensemble, which was founded by Brecht and whose home remains the theater where the opera premiered in 1928.
As BAM explains, “Murderous antihero Mackie Messer (a.k.a. Mack the Knife) slashes through Victorian London in The Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht’s scandalous satire that electrified Weimar-era German audiences 400 times in just two years after its 1928 debut.
“A century later, Brecht’s razor-sharp critique of unbridled capitalism still cuts deep—an eerily prophetic vision of a well-fed society teetering on the brink, propelled by Kurt Weill’s infectious, jazz-infused score.
“Barrie Kosky’s Berliner Ensemble production is sly and perversely sexy, embracing seediness and cynicism with glitzy disillusion and more than a hint of danger. A master showman, Kosky manages to beguile us through the familiar rise and fall of Brecht’s sociopathic leading man, adding a knowing creepiness to his unrepentant antics.
“As Mack the Knife’s indelible melody lingers, this sleek, elemental staging amplifies the play’s knife-edge allure, proving its savage indictment of greed remains as urgent and seductive as ever,” BAM concluded.
Adeel Akhtar in Benedict Andrews’ production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard”
Amir Hamja
Discussing its Chekov production, St. Ann’s Warehouse said, “In this in-the-round staging, the international cast arrive all at once and remain visible throughout the show, free to improvise and inhabit the characters’ sacred home that will soon be gone. In the The Cherry Orchard Ranevskaya and her aristocratic household are confronted by the demands of a changing world. The tensions between the past and future, the personal and the political, are explored with urgency and passion while the family grapples with the inevitable loss.”
Andrews, the theater continued, “has developed a reputation as one of the world’s leading interpreters of Chekhov. With the critically acclaimed The Cherry Orchard, he takes on the writer’s masterpiece, contemporizing elements of the text in an unbridled, playful, and devastating vision that feels, (The Evening Standard said), ‘entirely true to the spirit of the original.’”
According to St. Ann’s, Andrews said, “I just love being in the rehearsal room with actors and Chekhov, it is the greatest gift. It invites enormous play, enormous exploration. It’s a very democratic, collective, exploratory process where there’s room for people to make offers and search for the life of the play together. By us putting the audience all the way around, there’s an openness to it, it’s only, only about the actors, their contact, and how they play with each other, and how that resonates with an audience. That collective experience is all I’m interested in.”
St. Ann’s previously offered Andrews’ production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Gillian Anderson, Vanessa Kirby and Ben Foster.
In an interview this week with Forbes.com, Andrews said the text he created for his Chekhov production is “direct and contemporary,” though he did retain Russian references. He also praised the intimacy of St. Ann’s theater.
Chekhov’s characters, he added, live in a society “that’s on the brink of change and uncertainty, there’s a storm on the horizon.”
In today’s “time of division, (for the audience) to watch an ensemble play like this together I find really moving,” he concluded.