our trip to see alan cumming onstage
Apr. 1st, 2006 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bironicThe Threepenny Opera!
What a riot. Raunchy, irreverent and incisive—perfect for Studio 54—it had some great songs, gorgeous costumes and makeup, fantastic minimalist scenery, and for the second time this week, men kissing. The new translation (Threepenny, for those of you who haven't heard of it, is a German play from the 1920's written by Bertolt Brecht with jazzy music by Kurt Weill) is by renowned playwright and Ferengi Grand Nagus Wallace Shawn, who crafted such catchy rhymes for the occasion as China/vagina. Jess said it was the best play she's ever seen. My only real complaint was that some of the early scenes in Act I fell flat, including one of Nelly McKay's songs and the establishing interactions between the main character and his coterie of criminals, but if the cast polishes their timing in a few places (it's still in previews, after all) it should be just fine.
In addition to its commentary on capitalism and inter-class relations, as appropriate now as in post-WWI Germany when the play was written, there was a plethora of parody as well as that postmodern sort of reference to the play as a play by the actors in it—breaking the fourth wall, I think is the official term. Many of the characters would more properly be called caricatures, their costumes, mannerisms and dances exaggerated for satirical effect. During a song called "The Ballad of the Happy Life," actors danced across the back of the stage wearing t-shirts with corporate logos on them. In the opening number the lined-up ensemble did a mockery of a kickline, lifting their legs only about a foot off the ground and continuing to kick for a little while after the music ended; later they swayed together in the background while one character sang. In the first and last scenes, the actors changed costumes onstage and touched up each other's makeup. At the end of certain songs or scenes an actor would announce the number and title of the next scene, and at the end of Act I, after an emotional solo sung in the snow (deliberately undercut by the fact that the snow machine hovered a few feet above her head), Nellie McKay said, "There will now be a 15-minute intermission." Sometimes a mirrored backdrop came down so we saw the actors' backs and our own faces in the audience. The play was supertitled like an opera, but, with one exception, instead of translating lyrics for the audience—everything was in English—, the equipment displayed only scene numbers and song titles and, at the end, "The End," followed by the lights coming on without a curtain call, and then, "Go Home!"
Alan Cumming played the lead, "Mac The Knife" Macheath, a suave, unapologetic, vulgar, kid-glove-wearing, cane-sporting thief, murderer, rapist, etc. who leads a disreputable gang and juggles at least four girlfriends/boyfriends/wives. He does well enough for himself until he weds Polly Peachum (the perfectly-cast singer Nellie McKay) at the beginning of the play; her parents, the slimy politician Mr. Peachum (Jim Dale, who does the American version of the Harry Potter audio books but is clearly a Broadway veteran) and shrill socialite Mrs. Peachum (Ana Gasteyer of Saturday Night Live), don't react well to the news that their daughter has married the most notorious criminal in London, and they set about getting Mac arrested and hanged so they can collect the £40 reward, protect the secret of their corrupt beggar-licensing practice, and make Polly available to a more suitable beau.
Unfortunately for the elder Peachums, Mac is quite close with the chief of police, Tiger Brown, an old "army buddy" who makes sure Mac's Scotland Yard file is kept innocently empty in exchange for a cut of Mac's profits. "Army buddy" is in quotes because it's made quite clear that the men share more than military camaraderie and an under-the-table business agreement. Mac invites Brown to his wedding party, greets and addresses him with more sincerity than he bestows upon anyone else, caresses his face, and then in the lively "The Army Song" proceeds to dance quite suggestively with him (we're talking butt-grabbingly suggestive), first with his new wife sandwiched in the middle and then as a slow-dancing couple among the ensemble. It was the sort of old-fashioned male/male relationship that runs deep and outlasts the flings they have with women, an intimacy that doesn't have to turn sexual but did in this case. At one or two points, they kiss. Throughout the play they share a line that goes something like "All these years, I've always seen the world in [or through?] your eyes." Near the end, when Brown caves to political pressure and allows Mac to be brought in to the Old Bailey, he stammers his excuses and begs the handcuffed Mac to talk to him, and when Mac looks at him he breaks down and has to leave. Later, awaiting execution, Mac tries to remain aloof but he and Brown end up standing face-to-face and reciting that line about seeing the world in each other's eyes again. Then Brown saves the day in gold short-shorts and cowboy boots...but we'll get to that in a minute.
Costumes were great: almost entirely in black, grays, and off-whites, with the exceptions of Brown's blue police uniform, the Peachums' comical light blue suit/red striped tie and low-cut pink business suit, and Mac's fluorescent orange prison uniform. With her cream wedding dress, pale skin and blond hair, Nellie McKay looked like a corpse out of a Tim Burton movie. Cyndi Lauper as the prostitute Jenny had really effective dark eyeliner and lipstick, complementing her scruffy feather boas and stockings and wild white-blonde hair. She had an awesome melancholic solo. The ensemble were a motley crew dressed in punk-goth-Victorian style. One guy looked just like fanon!Snape with chin-length black hair, tight black tunic with white trim on the cuffs and neck, and chunky, multi-buckled boots. Most of the color came from the backdrops, neon letters that dropped down from time to time announcing where the scene was taking place (i.e. "Empty Stable" for the wedding scene, which flickered and buzzed and became simply "Stable" when people arrived). At the beginning and the end, all the neon signs shone at once, a sort of Times Square effect that was quite pretty.
My favorite character was Lucy, Tiger Brown's daughter and Mac's secret paramour (well, secret in that everyone but Brown knows about it). We don't meet her until Act II, but then she practically steals the show. Picture, if you will, Mac sitting in his prison cell, when in walks a pretty young woman with straight black hair to her shoulders, wearing a black dress to mid-thigh with long flowing sleeves, a purple cravat dangling just beyond the bottom of the dress, black stockings and Doc Martens—in other words, one of the goths from among the ensemble. She speaks. And it's suddenly clear that the person playing Lucy is in fact a man.
If you've seen Wonder Boys, think Crabtree's transvestite date, Antonia Sloviak—I thought it might be the same actor playing Lucy until I remembered how tall Antonia was—otherwise, think Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, who has an almond-eyed, fine-boned face similar to this actor's (Brian Charles Rooney; you can check out briancharlesrooney.com, but the photos don't do Lucy justice). I don't know if there's a tradition of casting a man to play her (somehow, I doubt it), but it was awesome.
The moody Lucy tended to pout and make various catty faces, hunch his/her shoulders, slouch, and adorably turn his/her toes in. Her speaking voice was unmistakeably male, but when Rooney sang he achieved a stable soprano, so effectively that Jess leaned over to ask whether it was an actor or actress. I thought for a while that there must have been someone singing offstage while Rooney lip-synched, but the timing in his duet with Nellie McKay was too complicated for it. This guy must just have incredible range.
So anyway, Lucy comes in to see Mac in jail, where she runs into Polly. The two women take an instant dislike to each other, Lucy fakes pregnancy to try to win Mac from her, and they sing the hilarious "Jealousy Duet." Mrs. Peachum then drags Polly out, leaving Mac to sweet-talk Lucy into giving him her father's keys to the cell. She's finally won over when Mac pulls her head through the bars and kisses her thoroughly to prove she's the one he really loves.
Her shining moment comes a few scenes later when we see her sitting in her bedroom pouring rat poison into a bottle of gin that she plans to feed to Polly. She keeps making those great faces and throwing items offstage to resounding crashes, then sings an unbelievably funny "aria" about how much she wants Polly to die. The song starts out in German, and for the first and only time during the play, the supertitles display an English translation of the lyrics. Before long, however, it degenerates into a mix of the two languages and then switches completely to English, at which point the supertitles show the German, right up to Lucy's Evil Cackle of Doom ("Ha ha ha ha"), translated as "Ja ja ja ja!" Then Polly comes in and earns Lucy's reluctant sympathy so that when she finally picks up the gin glass Polly originally offered her, Polly grabs it, throws it away with a cry of "No! Don't drink that! It's rat poison!" and then gives a double confession: she pulls the pillow from her dress, and then she flashes her—and right after, also the audience. (Jess & I were too far up to determine what we were supposed to see under the skirt, but we could guess.) Polly is shocked, but by the end of the play they're happily sharing Mac, one on each arm.
There was no shortage of gender-bending. Most of the ensemble played two characters each, one male and one female. Mac kissed his share of the cast, whether female-as-female or male-as-male or male-as-female or what have you, including another m/m kiss with a male prostitute in Jenny's brothel.
What else? Oh yes, the end. It's Coronation Day, and we've got Mac making his last bitter/inspirational/sardonic-cultural-criticism speech to the gathered crowd of the poor and criminal before he's hanged. Then Mr. Peachum steps forward and informs the audience that the day is about to be saved, for a bearer of good news is galloping in, can't we hear the hooves beating as he rushes towards us. The crowd then dance around singing some phrase about how rescue is on the way, waving their arms and bopping around Mac under polka-dotted spotlights like they're in a nightclub, and lo and behold a man appears in mid-air on stage right, clad in nothing but gold sequined short-shorts and headband, cowboy boots, sunglasses and body glitter, and riding a carousel horse. I'm almost positive it was the actor who played Tiger Brown. The "Queen's messenger" steps off his steed, howdies the audience, unrolls his parchment and announces that Mac has been spared by royal decree, and not only that but he is being awarded a dukedom, a pension and a German castle. The Peachums cheer. Mac casts off his chains. The ensemble lines up again and sings the closing song. They scatter. The end. Go home.
What a riot. Raunchy, irreverent and incisive—perfect for Studio 54—it had some great songs, gorgeous costumes and makeup, fantastic minimalist scenery, and for the second time this week, men kissing. The new translation (Threepenny, for those of you who haven't heard of it, is a German play from the 1920's written by Bertolt Brecht with jazzy music by Kurt Weill) is by renowned playwright and Ferengi Grand Nagus Wallace Shawn, who crafted such catchy rhymes for the occasion as China/vagina. Jess said it was the best play she's ever seen. My only real complaint was that some of the early scenes in Act I fell flat, including one of Nelly McKay's songs and the establishing interactions between the main character and his coterie of criminals, but if the cast polishes their timing in a few places (it's still in previews, after all) it should be just fine.
In addition to its commentary on capitalism and inter-class relations, as appropriate now as in post-WWI Germany when the play was written, there was a plethora of parody as well as that postmodern sort of reference to the play as a play by the actors in it—breaking the fourth wall, I think is the official term. Many of the characters would more properly be called caricatures, their costumes, mannerisms and dances exaggerated for satirical effect. During a song called "The Ballad of the Happy Life," actors danced across the back of the stage wearing t-shirts with corporate logos on them. In the opening number the lined-up ensemble did a mockery of a kickline, lifting their legs only about a foot off the ground and continuing to kick for a little while after the music ended; later they swayed together in the background while one character sang. In the first and last scenes, the actors changed costumes onstage and touched up each other's makeup. At the end of certain songs or scenes an actor would announce the number and title of the next scene, and at the end of Act I, after an emotional solo sung in the snow (deliberately undercut by the fact that the snow machine hovered a few feet above her head), Nellie McKay said, "There will now be a 15-minute intermission." Sometimes a mirrored backdrop came down so we saw the actors' backs and our own faces in the audience. The play was supertitled like an opera, but, with one exception, instead of translating lyrics for the audience—everything was in English—, the equipment displayed only scene numbers and song titles and, at the end, "The End," followed by the lights coming on without a curtain call, and then, "Go Home!"
Alan Cumming played the lead, "Mac The Knife" Macheath, a suave, unapologetic, vulgar, kid-glove-wearing, cane-sporting thief, murderer, rapist, etc. who leads a disreputable gang and juggles at least four girlfriends/boyfriends/wives. He does well enough for himself until he weds Polly Peachum (the perfectly-cast singer Nellie McKay) at the beginning of the play; her parents, the slimy politician Mr. Peachum (Jim Dale, who does the American version of the Harry Potter audio books but is clearly a Broadway veteran) and shrill socialite Mrs. Peachum (Ana Gasteyer of Saturday Night Live), don't react well to the news that their daughter has married the most notorious criminal in London, and they set about getting Mac arrested and hanged so they can collect the £40 reward, protect the secret of their corrupt beggar-licensing practice, and make Polly available to a more suitable beau.
Unfortunately for the elder Peachums, Mac is quite close with the chief of police, Tiger Brown, an old "army buddy" who makes sure Mac's Scotland Yard file is kept innocently empty in exchange for a cut of Mac's profits. "Army buddy" is in quotes because it's made quite clear that the men share more than military camaraderie and an under-the-table business agreement. Mac invites Brown to his wedding party, greets and addresses him with more sincerity than he bestows upon anyone else, caresses his face, and then in the lively "The Army Song" proceeds to dance quite suggestively with him (we're talking butt-grabbingly suggestive), first with his new wife sandwiched in the middle and then as a slow-dancing couple among the ensemble. It was the sort of old-fashioned male/male relationship that runs deep and outlasts the flings they have with women, an intimacy that doesn't have to turn sexual but did in this case. At one or two points, they kiss. Throughout the play they share a line that goes something like "All these years, I've always seen the world in [or through?] your eyes." Near the end, when Brown caves to political pressure and allows Mac to be brought in to the Old Bailey, he stammers his excuses and begs the handcuffed Mac to talk to him, and when Mac looks at him he breaks down and has to leave. Later, awaiting execution, Mac tries to remain aloof but he and Brown end up standing face-to-face and reciting that line about seeing the world in each other's eyes again. Then Brown saves the day in gold short-shorts and cowboy boots...but we'll get to that in a minute.
Costumes were great: almost entirely in black, grays, and off-whites, with the exceptions of Brown's blue police uniform, the Peachums' comical light blue suit/red striped tie and low-cut pink business suit, and Mac's fluorescent orange prison uniform. With her cream wedding dress, pale skin and blond hair, Nellie McKay looked like a corpse out of a Tim Burton movie. Cyndi Lauper as the prostitute Jenny had really effective dark eyeliner and lipstick, complementing her scruffy feather boas and stockings and wild white-blonde hair. She had an awesome melancholic solo. The ensemble were a motley crew dressed in punk-goth-Victorian style. One guy looked just like fanon!Snape with chin-length black hair, tight black tunic with white trim on the cuffs and neck, and chunky, multi-buckled boots. Most of the color came from the backdrops, neon letters that dropped down from time to time announcing where the scene was taking place (i.e. "Empty Stable" for the wedding scene, which flickered and buzzed and became simply "Stable" when people arrived). At the beginning and the end, all the neon signs shone at once, a sort of Times Square effect that was quite pretty.
My favorite character was Lucy, Tiger Brown's daughter and Mac's secret paramour (well, secret in that everyone but Brown knows about it). We don't meet her until Act II, but then she practically steals the show. Picture, if you will, Mac sitting in his prison cell, when in walks a pretty young woman with straight black hair to her shoulders, wearing a black dress to mid-thigh with long flowing sleeves, a purple cravat dangling just beyond the bottom of the dress, black stockings and Doc Martens—in other words, one of the goths from among the ensemble. She speaks. And it's suddenly clear that the person playing Lucy is in fact a man.
If you've seen Wonder Boys, think Crabtree's transvestite date, Antonia Sloviak—I thought it might be the same actor playing Lucy until I remembered how tall Antonia was—otherwise, think Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, who has an almond-eyed, fine-boned face similar to this actor's (Brian Charles Rooney; you can check out briancharlesrooney.com, but the photos don't do Lucy justice). I don't know if there's a tradition of casting a man to play her (somehow, I doubt it), but it was awesome.
The moody Lucy tended to pout and make various catty faces, hunch his/her shoulders, slouch, and adorably turn his/her toes in. Her speaking voice was unmistakeably male, but when Rooney sang he achieved a stable soprano, so effectively that Jess leaned over to ask whether it was an actor or actress. I thought for a while that there must have been someone singing offstage while Rooney lip-synched, but the timing in his duet with Nellie McKay was too complicated for it. This guy must just have incredible range.
So anyway, Lucy comes in to see Mac in jail, where she runs into Polly. The two women take an instant dislike to each other, Lucy fakes pregnancy to try to win Mac from her, and they sing the hilarious "Jealousy Duet." Mrs. Peachum then drags Polly out, leaving Mac to sweet-talk Lucy into giving him her father's keys to the cell. She's finally won over when Mac pulls her head through the bars and kisses her thoroughly to prove she's the one he really loves.
Her shining moment comes a few scenes later when we see her sitting in her bedroom pouring rat poison into a bottle of gin that she plans to feed to Polly. She keeps making those great faces and throwing items offstage to resounding crashes, then sings an unbelievably funny "aria" about how much she wants Polly to die. The song starts out in German, and for the first and only time during the play, the supertitles display an English translation of the lyrics. Before long, however, it degenerates into a mix of the two languages and then switches completely to English, at which point the supertitles show the German, right up to Lucy's Evil Cackle of Doom ("Ha ha ha ha"), translated as "Ja ja ja ja!" Then Polly comes in and earns Lucy's reluctant sympathy so that when she finally picks up the gin glass Polly originally offered her, Polly grabs it, throws it away with a cry of "No! Don't drink that! It's rat poison!" and then gives a double confession: she pulls the pillow from her dress, and then she flashes her—and right after, also the audience. (Jess & I were too far up to determine what we were supposed to see under the skirt, but we could guess.) Polly is shocked, but by the end of the play they're happily sharing Mac, one on each arm.
There was no shortage of gender-bending. Most of the ensemble played two characters each, one male and one female. Mac kissed his share of the cast, whether female-as-female or male-as-male or male-as-female or what have you, including another m/m kiss with a male prostitute in Jenny's brothel.
What else? Oh yes, the end. It's Coronation Day, and we've got Mac making his last bitter/inspirational/sardonic-cultural-criticism speech to the gathered crowd of the poor and criminal before he's hanged. Then Mr. Peachum steps forward and informs the audience that the day is about to be saved, for a bearer of good news is galloping in, can't we hear the hooves beating as he rushes towards us. The crowd then dance around singing some phrase about how rescue is on the way, waving their arms and bopping around Mac under polka-dotted spotlights like they're in a nightclub, and lo and behold a man appears in mid-air on stage right, clad in nothing but gold sequined short-shorts and headband, cowboy boots, sunglasses and body glitter, and riding a carousel horse. I'm almost positive it was the actor who played Tiger Brown. The "Queen's messenger" steps off his steed, howdies the audience, unrolls his parchment and announces that Mac has been spared by royal decree, and not only that but he is being awarded a dukedom, a pension and a German castle. The Peachums cheer. Mac casts off his chains. The ensemble lines up again and sings the closing song. They scatter. The end. Go home.
