Richard Termine

The Brooklyn Academy of Music was hit unusually hard by COVID closures and had to make deep staffing cuts and severely reduce programming. However, BAM has once again been “the place to be” in early 2025 with the instantly sold-out run of Rebecca Frecknall’s controversial staging of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire starring Patsy Ferran and Paul Mescal and, during the first weekend of April, the second local visit of the Berliner Ensemble presenting Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper, this time directed by Barrie Kosky.

Fourteen years ago, BAM hosted the Berliner Ensemble’s Threepenny Opera in Robert Wilson’s surprise-less production, one I thoroughly disliked.

Wilson’s Threepenny was one of the first performances I reviewed for parterre box and I went a bit overboard with background information, so if you want to learn more about Dreigroschenoper, check out that piece.

Kosky’s three-hour edition was not without its occasional longeurs, but it was as thrillingly inviting as Wilson’s had been off-putting. Except for plentiful video streams, the work of nearly all of the most in-demand opera regietheater directors remains unseen in the US. However, one Kosky production has been enthusiastically embraced by companies across America: his silent-film-flavored Die Zauberflöte, originally created for Berlin’s Komische Oper which Kosky led for a decade beginning in 2012.

That Mozart production served as Kosky’s NYC debut when it was presented in 2019 by Lincoln Center-s now-defunct Mostly Mozart Festival. While I appreciated its ingenuity and can imagine why it’s become so popular, it felt coldly gimmicky or exactly the opposite of the Met’s current Simon McBurney production.

Kosky was expected to make his Met debut in 2020 with Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel but that had to be postponed or, more likely, canceled. Instead of Fiery Angel the Met should invite him to direct instead the composer’s Love for Three Oranges which would almost certainly be a hit the Met needs.

During his tenure at the Komischeoper, Kosky directed wildly popular revivals of near-forgotten operettas, as well as Broadway hits like Chicago and La Cage aux Folles. That crowd-pleasing showmanship was much in evidence at BAM during Threepenny’s irresistible musical numbers. While Weill won the evening, Brecht lost with often-labored book scenes that Kosky sought to enliven by having his athletic cast bound up, down and around Rebecca Ringst’s stage-filling jungle-gym set. Perhaps in a rush to get to the next song, the director had his actors race through the dialogue so swiftly that I nearly got whiplash from glancing up and back from the characters on stage to the projected titles as both whizzed by.

Fiery conductor Adam Benzwi and his six swinging musicians playing in a slightly raised pit got the evening off to a brilliant start with a dynamically idiomatic rendition of Weill’s overture. Through the curtain of long silver strips poked the spotlit head of Josefin Platt as The Moon Over Soho (Kosky’s invention) for the first of many iterations we’d hear of the show’s hit-tune “Mack the Knife.” Her haunting rendition called to mind Winnie Shaw’s solo at the opening and closing of the stunning “Lullaby of Broadway” sequence in Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1935

Peachum, played by Tito Nest, then entered, microphone in hand, to greet the audience like a skilled Las Vegas comedian. He even engaged in contentious back-and-forth with an inquisitive audience member, one of the beggars named Filch, who turned out to be played by the effortlessly charismatic Macheath, Gabriel Schneider. After some back and forth between Peachum and members of the band, the drama proceeded in a fairly straightforward manner—no more of Brecht’s intended Verfremdung-effekt.

Though Nest and Schneider were compelling actors and effective singers, the women instead, more often than not, captured the limelight. Polly Peachum, petulant in pink, played with impudent energy by Maeve Metelka, battled with her elegantly tall and slender mother (Constanze Becker) whose world-weary “Ballad of Sexual Dependency” cast its wicked spell. This early scene of bickering between the three Peachums handily demonstrated that the Berliner’s actors were also fine singers tackling Weill’s propulsive music and Brecht’s biting lyrics with magnetic élan.

Richard Termine

While Schneider’s wiry Mackie (clad in a black tank-top—or rather, it might be more appropriately called a “wife-beater) bewitched all the women, he was also in the erotic thrall of Tiger Brown, played with violent cross-dressing swagger by Kathrin Wehlisch. Their violently vigorous “Cannon Song” proved to be my favorite and most insistent earworm of the evening: “Beefsteak Tartar!”

With mustached Kathrin Wehlisch’s macho Tiger, Bettina Hope as a brawny Jenny projected a decidedly androgynous allure. However, Brown’s daughter ditsy Lucy was all feminine pouts and wiles. Laura Balzer delighted in twirling about in Dinah Ehm’s delicious baby-blue costume of three rings of fringes. Though she perhaps had the weakest voice of the cast, she nonetheless stylishly served up the work’s most “operatic” numbers: her mock-dramatic recitative and the divine jealous duet with Polly—both of which echo the opera seria that John Gay was parodying in his Beggar’s Opera, the source of Weill and Brecht’s Threepenny.

The long first act ended on such a thrilling high that the second act could scarcely avoid being a let-down–which it mostly was. However, Kosky scored a coup with his ending. Usually Mackie, having spent a considerable time in prison, is saved from hanging at the last minute by the appearance of a deus ex machina messenger. However, at BAM, Mackie is strikingly hanged with Schneider suspended high above the above the stage dangling from his noose. Once his message of reprieve is received, he reanimates in a series of hilarious airborne poses before joining everyone in a rousing “Final Verses of the Ballad” featuring the welcome return of the Moon Over Soho.

While Brecht’s drama failed to make most of its blatant points, under Kosky’s guidance Weill’s score scintillated and soared; I immediately wanted to hear the whole thing again. At home I put on the cast recording of the notable 1976 New York Shakespeare Festival production with Raul Julia and Ellen Greene that ended up on Broadway. Its trenchant English translation by Ralph Mannheim and John Willett remains a raunchy joy but the music sounded a bit slow and safe after Benzwi’s blistering reading in which the percussive fire of the German text singed our ears.

HK Gruber, whose chamber version of Die Seiben Todsünden I heard at Zankel Hall last year with Wallis Giunta as Anna I, also conducted a concert version of Dreigroschen oper with prominent opera singers including Ian Bostridge (as an unlikely Mackie), Dorothea Röschmann, Angelika Kirchschlager, and Hanna Schwarz. It proves an inordinately interesting and (I think) pretty successful experiment.

If you agree that opera singers might be successful beggars and whores, whom might Peter Gelb cast for a Met 3Penny?