Problematic but a classic, The Threepenny Opera was trouble from the time of its premiere at Theater am Schiffbauerdamm back in 1928. “It’s one of the most famous disasters of all time,” director Barrie Kosky tells Observer. “Half of the set fell down about half an hour before the show. The audience didn’t understand it; they didn’t really like it. Everyone thought it was going to be the biggest flop of all time.”
Kosky, considered the finest opera director of his generation, is bringing his 2021 Berliner Ensemble production to St. Ann’s Warehouse, courtesy of BAM, for four nights (April 3 through 6), marking his New York City premiere. The well-reviewed production centers on the scabrous Mackie Messer, the infamous thief and cutthroat and the subject of the tune Mack the Knife, made famous by Bobby Darin and Frank Sinatra in the 1950s.
Based on Beggar’s Opera, John Gay’s 18th-century play, The Threepenny Opera represents the second collaboration between left-wing avant-garde poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht and the classically-trained composer Kurt Weill. When a 1920s production of John Gay’s play was selling out houses in London, Brecht’s lover and translator, Elisabeth Hauptmann, suggested the material for adaptation. Set in the back alleys of London, the narrative focuses on Mackie, who seduces and marries Polly Peachum, daughter to the King of the Beggars. When the latter finds out who his new son-in-law is, he appeals to police inspector Tiger Brown who, despite being an old army buddy of Mackie’s, is persuaded to issue a warrant for his arrest. Mackie takes it on the lam, leaving Polly to lead the gang, which she does with preternatural abilities.
“It’s cynical, satirical, these people are charming monsters,” laughs Kosky. “Late twenties Berlin was a place where you could only be cynical. But despite the play’s nihilism and cynicism, it’s saved by Brecht’s humor and Weill’s music which make it human.”
Since corruption, greed and narcissism never go out of style, the show remains relevant in any era. “The triumph of terrible people is timeless. They all get off in the end. Even Mackie—he’s sentenced to death, and there’s the deus ex machina when the noose is around his neck. Now a horseman comes on and tells him the Queen has pardoned him, and he lives on.”
Kosky’s approach to the material was to prohibit anything that smacked of Weimar Republic Germany or the Kander and Ebb musical, Cabaret. Brecht who, until then, played mainly to marginal audiences, pulled the material in the direction of social justice. And Weill, steeped in the language of Bach and his own heritage as the son of a Cantor, emphasized emotional desolation.
“Firstly, Brecht and Weill were experimenting with theatrical and musical language. There hadn’t been a piece quite like this before. That range between what the text is doing and what the music is doing is what makes it so fantastic. Finding a way in which you can do this tango between the intellectually cerebral satirical sarcasm of Brecht’s text with the beautiful, often melancholic yearning of Kurt Weill’s music,” says Kosky of the production’s main challenge.
Weill’s musical language is influenced by synagogue chants combined with the rhythm of the 20th-century metropolis—a mix of the ancient and the new—with some of Weill’s hero J.S. Bach thrown in for good measure. “He created a musical style that was unique and revolutionary because he believed in incorporating not just jazz but other instruments and folk music into his music. He transformed it into something new.”
It’s not only the music that makes The Threepenny Opera revolutionary. It’s the ultra-modern notion (for the time) of a show drawing attention to the fact that it’s a show. “Even though the actors are speaking dialog, it must be done in a way that is always alerting the audience to the playing of the make-believe, to the artifice.”
Kosky reminded his cast that they could break the fourth wall at any time, comparing the approach to vaudeville. “The challenge is to keep it light. I was constantly saying to the actors, ‘Speak it like a character from a Lubitsch film, fast and clever. Don’t overlay all of this with meaning.”
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Weill first set Brecht’s lyrics to music for the song cycle Mahagonny, written for the Festival of German Music, a then-annual event held at Baden-Baden. Months later, Brecht approached him to write a score for what would become The Threepenny Opera. While developing the script, Brecht retreated to a villa in south France along with Weill and his wife Lotte Lenya, Hauptmann and director Erich Engel, but ducked out in July to take care of business in Berlin and didn’t return until eleven days before opening. The show was a smash hit throughout Europe but flopped on Broadway in 1933. It wasn’t until a 1954 revival that it caught on in North America.
“Brecht and Weill, they weren’t friends, they got on at this stage pretty well, but a few years later, they weren’t working with each other,” says Kosky, who produced the show at the theater in which it premiered in 1928. “It was very special to be rehearsing Threepenny Opera in the theater where Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, et al., worked. And when you work with Berliner Ensemble, there is a desk, his original desk from when he started the Berliner Ensemble after the war,” says Kosky about working from Brecht’s desk, which he confesses to carving his initials in.
Originally from Melbourne, Australia, Kosky showed a proclivity for music early on, playing piano before he was five years old and adding the cello by the time he was six. Describing himself as “an obsessed theater kid,” he sang in the chorus and acted in school plays, though his main mentor was his Hungarian grandmother, who took him to his first opera, and his parents, who exposed him to every type of live entertainment, both classical and contemporary.
“I was a sponge. I wanted to be a concert pianist and wanted to be a conductor. I directed my first show at school at fifteen—Wozzeck,” he says, citing Alban Berg’s opera about madness and murder. After graduating from Melbourne Grammar School, a private school for boys, he attended the University of Melbourne, where he directed Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Frank Wedekind’s The Lulu Plays, Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box.
After building an illustrious career in theater and opera in his home country, he became co-director of Vienna’s Schauspielhaus Wien and quickly became one of Europe’s most in-demand directors. Named artistic director for the prestigious Komische Oper Berlin in 2012, a position he held for ten years, Kosky went on to win the award for Best Director at the 2014 International Opera Awards.
“Some of my friends apologize for not liking opera. Don’t apologize. No one should be forced to go to the opera,” says Kosky, who is currently prepping Wagner’s Ring Cycle in London. “You go and see opera because I believe it’s the highest form of European performing arts that we’ve made over hundreds of years. And when it’s good, it’s untouchable,” he pauses, smiling slyly. “And when it’s bad, it’s excruciating.”
Tickets for Kosky’s production of The Threepenny Opera are available via BAM, with shows on April 3-6, 2025.
