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Oh sure, the lights may be aimed so as to project the cast's menacing shadows into a spooky upstage tangle, and the very walls of the set may collide at conflicting angles that suggest you've landed at the corner of Flop Street and Nowhere Boulevard. But as soon as the action begins, you'll be able to settle back in your chair, knowing that you have nothing to fear. Rarely is danger as sterilized as Clarke allows it to be here. A gleaming curtain is pulled back and forth across Robert Israel's set to create an "in-one" environment that Christopher Akerlind aggressively but caressingly lights. The costumes (Donna Zakowska), if not high fashion, are above-average shabby chic. And the performers, who include F. Murray Abraham, Sally Murphy, Laura Osnes, Michael Park, and Mary Beth Peil, are of the ritzy, legit type, sporting sparkling smiles and brightly polished voices. Even the whores and their johns look like the sort of good-spirited folks you'd be comfortable taking home to Mom and Dad (okay, okay, after they put a few more clothes). This is a far cry from the jagged, adventurous work that jolted Berlin (and, later, the world) to attention nearly nine decades ago, that branded librettist-lyricist Brecht as a socialist provocateur par excellence and Weill as his composer of record. Their update to John Gay's 18th-century The Beggar's Opera, kicking the action forward a hundred-some years and Gay's sound into the then-trendy (and, in many cases, still-trendy) jazz idiom shocked and thrilled by virtue of its ugly beauty, which reinforced Brecht's satirical paean to the poor as something that had not before been seen in quite the same way. As filtered through Brecht's unique sensibility, which refused to let audiences merely "enjoy" the story and ignore its messages, how could it help but make an impact? Clarke's rigidly, impressively professional take is too safe to make an impact of any kind. (Only a bulldog named Romeo, in a surprise supporting role, has the feel of dastardly invention.) It even uses the friendliest of the popular translations: Marc Blitzstein's 1954 Theatre de Lys rethink, which reinvigorated the property in the public's consciousness after its largely disastrous Broadway bow 21 years earlier, but at the expense of some of its defining, energetic rage.
Park's leading-man looks and suave, confident singing voice are well in keeping with what you'd expect of a musical's hero; as are Osnes's dulcet tones, which served her better floating on "In My Own Little Corner" in the more innocent Cinderella than they do in the ironic "Barbara Song" here. Murphy has a similar problem, reading as such a refined, if mildly perturbed Jenny that, when she lets semi-loose with "Pirate Jenny" you will not exactly be reminded of the dry, forceful instability of Lotte Lenya (who recreated and recorded the role in 1954, and has ever since owned it), or for that matter anyone other than a buttoned-up office worker mourning a lonely Saturday night. Closer to the mark is Abraham, who's a master of Sprechstimme more than actual singing, but meets no intention he doesn't embrace wholeheartedly—his war against Macheath has a real, toxic punch and propels the second half of the show in a way that only Osnes and Cooper's "Jealousy Duet" approximates (and then primarily because the fluttery Osnes plays so strikingly against the earthy desperation Cooper radiates). Less compelling, but better balanced overall, is Peil, who tinges her own precise soprano with a harshness that makes the "Ballad of Sexual Dependency" a knowing laceration against an indifferent world. If only we saw less of that indifference first-hand. You don't get the impression that Clarke is going for showy, but she achieves it just the same with swirling stage patterns and tidy dances more redolent of the fluffed-up bourgeois than of the suffering underclass Brecht sought to champion. Suffering, in fact, is nowhere to be found, either onstage or from the audience—this is the smoothest, slickest, most approachable take on the show I've seen. That also makes it among the least effective at delivering much beyond the entertainment that Brecht scorned. There's a big difference between medium rare and raw, and it's one I was aware of through every minute of this thoroughly practical, thoroughly pleasurable, and thoroughly inert Threepenny Opera.
The Threepenny Opera
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