“The Threepenny Opera” will be noteworthy for several reasons when it returns to New York this spring for an all-too-brief appearance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
It will be a homecoming, to start. Kurt Weill wrote the music and Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann wrote the text for “Threepenny,” which was born in Berlin, an artifact of Weimar-era culture. However, when it was resurrected Off Broadway in 1954, it saw a midcentury resurrection on the level of a pop-cultural sensation.
Additionally, the Berliner Ensemble, which Brecht established and continues to run out of the theater where “Threepenny” debuted in 1928, will play it. The team is a reliable steward of a task that is frequently neglected in modern times.
The most significant aspect of this run of “Threepenny,” which is presented by BAM and St. Ann’s Warehouse from April 3 to 6, is that it will be the first time that New York audiences will get the chance to view the director Barrie Kosky’s work.
Even though Kosky, 58, has previously been on local playbills with his production of “The Magic Flute,” which he co-wrote with the company 1927, at the 2019 Mostly Mozart Festival, “Threepenny” will be his first entirely original production. This should be surprising given that Kosky is one of the busiest, smartest, and most entertaining filmmakers working in Europe right now.
He is a successful theatrical and opera director. His work has a blend of brilliance and spectacle that would revitalize both Broadway and the Metropolitan Opera, making it suitable for both venues. He will be able to appeal to audiences in New York with this “Threepenny.” Are impresarios going to be observing?
Kosky, who was born in Australia, has called himself a “gay, Jewish kangaroo.” His grandparents were transplants from Europe, originally from Budapest and the Belarusian shtetls. He recounted in his book “‘Und Vorhang auf, Hallo!,'” or “And Curtain Up, Hello!” on how his Hungarian grandmother had instilled in him a love of operetta. Ultimately, he became passionate about classical music, operas, and musicals, regardless of genre or hierarchy.
“The Magic Flute” was the “mother ship of the musical,” in his opinion. Both “The Simpsons” and Mahler’s symphonies were works of art. He likes to add that two other cultural artifacts, Kafka’s work and “The Muppets,” influenced his artistic development as he grew up and started acting in and then directing theater.
In his opinion, they weren’t all that different. There are a number of Kafka stories involving talking animals, and Kermit’s constant battle to maintain his program has a Kafkaesque quality. He viewed “The Muppets” as “a queer space,” where Miss Piggy was the dominant drag queen, teasing Kermit, a homosexual “Max Reinhardt meets Charlie Chaplin,” and flirting with Rudolf Nureyev in a steam room.
Although Kosky’s claim that his style is reminiscent of Kafka and “The Muppets” is spectacular, it is true if you see his creations with that perspective. His presentations, which usually take place in dreamscapes, seldom include any traces of realism. It’s possible for a room to be wallless, for humor to turn into an unreasonable nightmare, or for existence to be nothing more than a never-ending vaudeville show.
Before thriving in Europe, Kosky’s career took off in Australia. He held positions as director of the Komische Oper in Berlin and the Schauspielhaus in Vienna. You get the feeling that Kermit is committed to putting up a strong performance in all of his ventures. Because of this, even his less successful productions work effectively as theater.
