We can enjoy it all, without ever thinking of capitalism. Characters seem aware that they are playing to the audience, showing off their skillfulness at greed, crime, and seduction. “The Black Freighter.” Besides the aesthetic parody, gender roles get attention, just as they did in the Gay original. Threepenny was billed not as an opera or a musical but as a “play with music.” The hero, Macheath, is aware that he is a pop star, and comes out singing his own pop anthem, “Mack the Knife.” Jenny, originally played by composer Kurt Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya, appears as a character in “Mack the Knife” and is the heroine of her own fantasy in the play’s other pop hit, “Pirate Jenny,” a.k.a. Its source, John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, was a satire of Italian opera.
Certainly, one could stage the play as an anti-capitalist rant, but the play offers so many levels of satire and parody, that to do so undersells. He also says that he wanted to distance the audience from the action and characters to encourage it to respond intellectually to what it was seeing.
Certainly, Brecht’s notes and “Tips” to actors suggest that is part of what he was after. Reviewers of The Threepenny Opera often mention its indictment of capitalism. Published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series in a trusted translation by Ralph Manheim and John Willett, this edition features extensive notes and commentary including an introduction to the play, Brecht's own notes on the play, a full appendix of textual variants, a note by composer Kurt Weill, a transcript of a discussion about the play between Brecht and a theatre director, plus editorial notes on the genesis of the play. With Kurt Weill's unforgettable music - one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz to the theatre - it became a popular hit throughout the western world. Despite the resistance by Macheaf's friend the Chief of Police, Macheaf is eventually condemned to hang until in a comic reversal the queen pardons him and grants him a title and land. It focuses on the feud between Macheaf - an amoral criminal - and his father in law, a racketeer who controls and exploits London's beggars and is intent on having Macheaf hanged. Based on John Gay's eighteenth centuryBeggar's Opera, The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho.
0 kommentar(er)
