‘Threepenny’ a show for the people

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From left, Robert Kerr and Janara Rose Kellerman star in “Three Penny Opera”
From left, Robert Kerr and Janara Rose Kellerman star in “Three Penny Opera”

By Jay Harvey

Everybody knows the big pop hit in “The Threepenny Opera,” familiar in English for decades as “Mac the Knife.” The pop culture credentials of that song actually go back centuries.

In context, “Mac the Knife” introduces early in the show the legendary London criminal Macheath. His story was turned into a new kind of opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill for audiences in the fragile Weimar Republic of the late 1920s.

Yet the playwright and composer borrowed their new kind of opera from John Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera,” a hit in 18th-century England for its nose-thumbing stance against a lofty foreign import and its remote gods and heroes: Italian opera. That show’s songs were set to familiar tunes of the day, and its characters were urban lowlifes.

So when Indianapolis Opera presents “The Threepenny Opera” for two weekends this month at the Basile Opera Center, it’s actually offering an “outreach” show with a long pedigree. There’s no need to “bring opera down to the people’s level” when “The Threepenny Opera” is already there – and maybe beneath it.

Director Bill Fabris promises that the production will offer the best English version of the story, with much of the “rough stuff” of the original intact, though still far from the most explicit translated version of the texts. But when the songs and libretto deal with thievery, murder, prostitution, official corruption and assorted other varieties of human knavery, there’s no way to pretty up the work. Fabris and his team wouldn’t want to.

“This translation is closer to the German original,” he said, adding it still will have resonance to current events in the world, including skepticism about banks and questions about a leader’s birth certificate.

The work’s proper setting is long-ago London, but Indianapolis Opera has changed the look of the piece to the time of the work’s creation. The setting and costumes will have a Berlin cabaret look, he said, that may remind Indianapolis audiences of the hit musical and movie “Cabaret.”

The idea is to present German city dwellers telling the story of some disreputable characters just before their country’s fall into Nazism, he said.

“The songs and dancing are like vaudeville, and we use hard-edge spotlights reminiscent of that time and place,” Fabris said.

Stage sets are minimal, so the audience’s imagination will be put to work filling in some physical details. The advantage? It gives the intimate Basile Opera Center stage an openness to the interplay of light and shadow, character exits and entrances, and the naturalness of the musical and dramatic expression.

The cast has extensive opera experience, of course, but operatic vocal style isn’t cultivated in this production, Fabris said.

“I tell the cast never to sacrifice the voice for the style,” he said. “But the dialogue comes first, and the lyrics are important.”

Artistic director James Caraher has expanded the small stage band that plays a crucial role in putting across the story to relieve instrumentalists of the extensive doubling the score suggests. With the production spread over two weekends, Fabris expects cast and band to be able to “settle into it more with every performance, and you don’t often get that chance with many opera productions (in larger halls), which may run a couple of performances and that’s it.”

“There’s no hiding onstage: It has to be honest and real,” Fabris added. “The smaller venue allows normal gestures to come across more. It’s a visceral experience for the audience. The harshness is there, but there are plenty of funny moments, too.”

The Threepenny Opera ● 8 p.m. Oct. 11, 12, 18 and 19; 2 p.m. Oct. 13 and 20. ● Basile Opera Center, 4011 N. Pennsylvania St., Indianapolis ● Tickets $18, $25, $50 and $65 ● For more information visit www.ticketmaster.com or call (800) 745-3000.


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