The Threepenny Opera The Hypocrites
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But there’s at least one place where it’s still possible to find a little passionate Marxism: at the theater, in the plays of Bertolt Brecht. Sure, that passion has to be experienced at least partly as nostalgia these days—but when you’ve got a committed young ensemble led by a director like the Hypocrites’ Sean Graney, who uses the stage as a kind of particle accelerator for actors, even nostalgia can look awfully lively. Although flawed in certain hard-to-ignore ways, the Hypocrites’ version of The Threepenny Opera—Brecht’s great 80-year-old collaboration with Kurt Weill—parties like it’s 1928.
Polly’s something of an underworld aristocrat herself: her parents train and equip London’s beggars. But the Peachums aren’t the least bit happy with the match. In fact, they’re so enraged when they finally get wind of it—well afterward—that they set out to destroy Macheath. Quickly learning that an appeal to the legal system won’t work, they resort to tactics that exploit their considerable influence among the city’s legions of poor folks and whores. The narrative becomes a series of shrewd gambits and narrow escapes punctuated by Weill’s ballads of cynicism, black comedy, or rage—like the one where a hotel maid’s Cinderella fantasy extends to bloody death for her bosses.
Others, though, end up screeching by the second hour, with 40 minutes left to go. Gregory Hardigan is one of these: trying to make a case for Macheath’s violent magnetism, he ends up barking way off-key. That this doesn’t ruin everything is some sort of testament—to Graney’s inventiveness, to the company’s formidable energy, maybe to the need for a show like The Threepenny Opera that can give you an inkling of where and with whom your interests lie.v
