Tuesday night was the final performance of Opera Boston’s production of Kurt Weill’s 1930 opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Opera Boston has developed a reputation for “presenting innovative repertoire and important but rarely performed works,” as stated in their program. Mahagonny is the story three fugitives who decide to establish a city founded on the four pleasures of eating, loving, fighting, and drinking. They hope such a place will attract unhappy men who will pay for services. Director Sam Helfrich handled this gritty, satirical play with fitting bawdiness.
It is hard to forget that Kurt Weill wrote the opera during the Weimar period in Germany. The opera paints an acute portrait of greed and desperation and the consequences of indulgence and imprudence. Playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote the libretto for Weill; the two collaborated on numerous operas that are a testimony to their artistic compatibility. Brecht’s unpolished, colloquial text complements the swanky, saloon flavor of Weill’s scoring. The text was later translated into English very successfully by Michael Feingold and is frequently performed in English as it was in Opera Boston’s production.
The set was appropriately dingy and used with extraordinary economy. Three porta-potties, a loading dock, a ticket window and a payphone captured Mahagonny’s raw environment. The loading dock that served as an auction block for the prostitutes doubled as a platform for an on-stage piano performance. The porta-potties that shook lewdly as prostitutes wearily entertained man after man, also served as a portal through which God visited the Mahagonny citizens in order to sentence them to the hell they built for themselves. It was disappointing that there was no set change during intermission, but the drab simplicity of the set highlighted the bleak, emptiness of the characters’ lives.
Daniel Snyder stood out as Jimmy MacIntyre, one of four men who journey from Alaska hoping to find happiness at Mahagonny. Snyder’s tenor voice was smooth, rich and youthful, but he added an element of roughness as his character became increasingly jaded. Soprano Amy Burton made her Opera Boston debut as Jenny Smith, the ringleader of the prostitutes who piques Jimmy’s interest and drains all of his money, leaving him broke, the worst offense imaginable in Mahagonny. Burton’s voice was clear and refined but not so proper as to contradict her character’s sassiness and coarseness. Mezzo-soprano Joyce Castle played Leocadia Begbick, Mahagonny’s thrifty Madam who came up with the idea of Mahagonny. Castle’s rougher, chestier voice fit her character’s crude, greedy nature.
Several of the numbers were memorably choreographed as group dances. When we first meet Jenny, she leads the other prostitutes in the famous “Alabama Song” as they arrive in Mahagonny seeking the next whiskey bar. The girls move languorously around the stage, sitting on their suitcases with open legs, applying their makeup in an overtly grotesque manner. Act II depicts each of the four pleasures in turn as they tempt the men and ultimately destroy them. Each one of these scenarios was preceded by a dance sequence in which the men mime the vices. The dance is comic, but as each scene is acted out the recurring dance becomes increasingly depressing as the men get tangled in their own ridiculousness. The opera was a thoroughly pleasurable experience, leaving me with an aftertaste of guilty indulgence.
Gil Rose conducted the Opera Boston ensemble with crisp precision. He was extremely responsive to the actors/singers as they took time to give the music a whimsical, sometimes even mocking, edge. Several of Weill’s songs from Mahagonny have been covered by Lou Reed, Van Morrison, David Bowie, Tom Waits, and the Doors, who made “Alabama Song” a well-known hit. Clearly, the music of Mahagonny is an important part of twentieth-century music and Opera Boston should be commended for producing such a colorful revival of a young classic.