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    At Carnegie Hall, Weimar Is Irresistible but Vaguely Defined

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    Carnegie’s intermittently illuminating festival “Fall of the Weimar Republic” has suffered from interjections of too much standard repertory.In the middle of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s suite of incidental music for “Much Ado About Nothing,” there’s a march meant to accompany Dogberry, Shakespeare’s comic constable, and his fellow watchmen.Written in the late 1910s, and played by Ensemble Modern at Zankel Hall on Friday as part of the Carnegie Hall festival “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice,” the march stepped along crisply, with dryly officious humor. But it also had an edge of sincere sternness. Cast over the bumptious charm was a hint of the ominous, of a real (rather than satirical) military buildup.The same uneasy combination of optimistic energy and dark clouds characterized Germany during the Weimar Republic, an experiment in democracy that began in the wake of the country’s defeat in World War I, in 1918, and lasted until the Nazi takeover in 1933.Weimar has lately been seized on by many Americans who see in it parallels to our own era. (To wit: tenuously free republican institutions, mainstream conservative complicity with the far right, divisions on the left, fear of a fascist overthrow, etc.)For Election Day 2020, two former U.S. attorneys general published an opinion piece in The Washington Post, saying that images from the Weimar era were “fresh enough in memory to offer a cautionary tale.” A few months later, Foreign Policy offered “Weimar’s Lessons for Biden’s America.” This January, Bernie Sanders said that if President Biden couldn’t prove government’s efficacy to voters, “then we are the Weimar Republic of the early 1930s.”That month, Carnegie opened “Fall of the Weimar Republic,” now in its final weeks. Past Carnegie festivals have focused on South Africa, Vienna, Berlin, Venice and migrations to America, among other topics.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At the Salzburg Festival, Bertolt Brecht Pushes Boundaries

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      Brecht’s 1944 play “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” is set to challenge its performers and audiences, just as a once-banned Brecht would have liked.As a playwright and director, Bertolt Brecht revolutionized theater, dragging 20th-century politics into the room and swapping escapism for urgent and timely themes played out almost in the laps of audience members.He also provoked many theatrical companies — notably the Salzburg Festival. In 1950, Brecht was given Austrian citizenship after agreeing to adapt the 15th-century play “Jedermann” (“Everyman”), a staple of the festival since 1920. But he never did, instead embracing Marxist ideologies and moving to East Berlin, which prompted an official boycott of his work in Austria that lasted 10 years. His works have rarely been performed at the Salzburg Festival since.But now, “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” his 1944 play written during his years in America, will be staged there on Aug. 12-22 (in German with English supertitles). In a theatrical choice that would have no doubt thrilled the ever-inventive Brecht, this “Chalk Circle” will be presented with the Swiss company Theater Hora, made up of actors with learning disabilities, underscoring the power of Brecht’s works to push the boundaries of both performers and audiences. This “Chalk Circle” feels more urgent and well-timed for those involved.“The play takes place during a civil war and is all about empathy,” Bettina Hering, the drama director of the Salzburg Festival, said in a video interview, “but it also shows that society is multilayered.”Like Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” “Chalk Circle” weaves motherhood into politics and the brutality of war. The play is based on a 13th-century Chinese parable, in which two women fight over the custody of a child. During wartime, a governor’s wife has abandoned her child, who is then saved by a servant girl. A judge determines that custody will be granted to the mother who can pull the child safely from a circle of chalk drawn around the child. Brecht used this as a metaphor for a misguided society.Rehearsal for “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” whose cast includes, from left, Remo Beuggert, Simone Gisler and Tiziana Pagliaro.Rimini ProtokollBrecht’s own family story and life in the theater reads like a drama. Born in Bavaria in 1898 and raised in a strict Christian household, he became interested in politics, theater and writing at a young age (he was a fierce critic of the carnage of his generation of young men in World War I and avoided combat as a medic). In Berlin, along with the German director Erwin Piscator, Brecht created what became known as “epic theater,” or “dialectical theater,” which asked audiences to confront sociopolitical issues rather than suspend disbelief and be swept away.This revolution in German theater flourished during the Weimar Republic, but Brecht left Germany when the Nazis gained power, fearing persecution, fleeing to Scandinavia and then America, where he lived in the Los Angeles area and co-wrote the story for one movie (“Hangmen Also Die!”) and many of his most famous plays, including “Chalk Circle.” After World War II, he returned to Europe, and though never officially a member of the Communist Party, his Marxist leanings prompted that boycott of his work in Austria from 1953 to 1963.“One critic wrote that it was an atomic bomb scandal,” Ms. Hering said. “It was the equivalent of cancel culture today.”His works are often heavy on politics and religion, from fascism (“The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”) to the clash between theology and science (“Life of Galileo”). He also wrote “The Threepenny Opera,” which the Salzburg Festival staged in 2015, with the composer Kurt Weill.Brecht died in East Berlin in 1956 at 58, leaving behind an enormous theatrical legacy.“One of his poems refers to the future when he won’t be needed, but we still live in a world he would recognize,” Tom Kuhn, a professor of German literature at Oxford University and one of the translators of Brecht’s “Collected Poems,” said in a video interview. “But we have populists strutting the stage. We have fascism. We have war in Europe. Brecht could comment on those in urgent and insistent ways.”That sense of relevancy is what drew Ms. Hering to “Chalk Circle” and to choose Theater Hora as the company to bring it to life. Brecht’s experimental theatrical style, as both a writer and director, felt perfectly suited to Hora, as did the mother-and-child plot of “Chalk Circle.”“People with disabilities are dependent on others,” Ms. Hering said. “They are like an eternal child in a way.”She invited Helgard Haug, a celebrated German director more associated with interactive theater who had never directed the Hora troupe, nor a Brecht piece, to lead this “Chalk Circle.” For Ms. Haug, it was both a daunting and exciting proposition.“I’m really interested when people really bring their own conditions to the stage where they are open enough to tell their own stories,” Ms. Haug said in a video interview. “It’s more than a discussion between two mothers. Can systems change? Can it be different? It feels special to stage Brecht with a group of performers who have their own approach and their own way to translate text into their own understanding.”The evolving relevance of Brecht’s works speaks to those still devoted to preserving his legacy and acknowledging that he created new possibilities for theater to educate and provoke audiences. And they inspire performers, playwrights and directors who come after him.“‘Chalk’ is a play for the moment, and I see it as a way to observe the difficulty of the world and how it is possible to find a right and honest way through chaos,” said Erdmut Wizisla, head of the Bertolt Brecht Archive in Berlin. “It is an invitation to think. He’s a poet. He’s a political author but not a politician. And that is why Brecht will always have a future.” More

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      Vienna Volksoper Pushes Boundaries With Its ‘Threepenny Opera’

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      Starting with “The Threepenny Opera,” the Volksoper in Vienna is reconsidering a series of works and inviting audiences to join the discussion.“The Threepenny Opera” could be considered an antiopera as much as its menacing lead character, Macheath, is an antihero. This satirical and existential piece spoofed opera and, in doing so, broke the rules and pushed the art form of musical theater forward.And this is precisely the lure for the Volksoper in Vienna. The house stages musicals and operas, often with a new spin. Right now, it is exploring “The Threepenny Opera,” with a new production running through January.The 1928 work, based on the 18th-century work “The Beggar’s Opera” by John Gay, was written by the German composer Kurt Weill and the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht as a harsh satire of capitalism just before the rise of Nazism. The show’s antihero, Macheath, is a criminal among a rogue’s gallery of friends and business acquaintances relishing in the corruption and greed of 19th-century England, but with a wink to pre-fascist Germany.Cue the Volksoper’s new Manifesto concept, which seeks to reconsider two pieces each year and give them life to new generations of theatergoers. While some might consider “The Threepenny Opera” to be off-putting, the Volksoper found it to be the perfect springboard.“When we started reading the text, we realized that everyone thought that they knew the text really well, but that nobody really did,” said the production’s director, Maurice Lenhard. “It felt like an experiment. But ‘The Threepenny Opera’ allows for that more than, say, a Mozart opera.”That experiment revealed that the sinister elements of the musical, from characters to the production design, were open to interpretation. The Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in New York, which oversees all of Weill’s productions, allowed for cross-gender casting, which was a way to dive deeper into the piece and find something more abstract, Mr. Lenhard said, rather than the usual gritty realism. More colorful costumes and sets (versus the street-urchin depiction of most productions) helped transform this production.The Volksoper is using more colorful costumes and sets for “The Threepenny Opera,” versus the street-urchin depiction of most productions of the show. Barbara Pálffy/Volksoper Wien“The Threepenny Opera” premiered in 1928 in Berlin and was performed thousands of times across Europe in several languages before Weill and Brecht fled Germany in 1933 as the Nazis seized power. Its initial New York production that same year closed after 12 performances. A revival in the 1950s cemented its place in theater history. But its many commercial productions, with such famous Macheaths as Raul Julia, Sting and Alan Cumming, have not always been successful critically or financially. It’s probably most famous for “Mack the Knife,” the sinister ballad about Macheath that became a perky, up-tempo jazz standard thanks to Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Bobby Darin.How the musical has been interpreted over the decades is part of the lure for the Volksoper team. Mr. Lenhard said the idea of cross-gender casting seemed ideal for “The Threepenny Opera” because of how Brecht revolutionized theater by challenging the audience with his “verfremdungseffekt.” This is often translated in English as the distancing, or alienation, effect, which sought to break the theatrical “fourth wall” and lure the audience into the production more as a critical observer, not just as the emotional passive observer.“Brecht was happy when the youngest character in one of his plays was played by an old person,” Mr. Lenhard said. “Then the audience had to really pay attention and to listen.”In another example of the Volksoper’s cross-gender casting, Sona MacDonald, center, is playing Macheath.Barbara Pálffy/Volksoper WienIn “Die Dreigroschenoper” at the Volksoper (this production is sung in the original German and runs through Jan. 23), Macheath is played by a woman, Sona MacDonald, and Jenny, the prostitute who was once Macheath’s lover and is in many ways the heart and soul — and hope — of the musical, is played by a man, Oliver Liebl.Despite these bold changes, no words have been altered, said Lotte de Beer, the artistic director of the Volksoper.“Not a word has been rewritten,” Ms. de Beer said. “Manifesto is not an invitation to rewrite anything.”But part of the Manifesto concept is bringing the audience into the discussion. For the debut of the series, the Volksoper held three evenings of talks with the public, with numbers from different musicals and operas performed. About 80 people attended each session, as well as an open rehearsal of “The Threepenny Opera” with an audience discussion afterward.It all seems suited to the vision of Weill and particularly Brecht, who was constantly pushing the boundaries of theater and how it can change culture.“Doing Brecht, you’re forced to reflect on the whole idea of how he imagined theater to be played,” Ms. de Beer said. “Brecht wanted to actively pull people out of their comfort zones.“This production is stirring up some reaction here in Vienna,” she added. “And I think that’s good.” More

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      ‘Mother Courage’ Review: Selling Her Wares Amid the Havoc of War

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      Irondale Ensemble’s adaptation of Brecht’s antiwar epic captures some of its spirit but lacks any real philosophical or political heft.There’s no virtue in war. But there is profit — for those ruthless enough to get it.So preaches Bertolt Brecht in his play “Mother Courage and Her Children,” a new adaptation of which is now running as part of Irondale Ensemble’s Brecht in Exile series. This production, directed and adapted by Jim Niesen, using John Willett’s classic translation, captures some of the spirit of Brecht’s cynical war fable but none of the philosophical or political heft.Mother Courage (an appropriately brusque Vicky Gilmore, in a knit hat, leather jacket and combat boots), traveling with her three children, is selling goods from a cart during the Thirty Years’ War. There’s Eilif (Nolan Kennedy), her pugnacious elder son who’s recruited as a soldier; Swiss Cheese (Terry Greiss), her honest but dimwitted younger son who becomes an army paymaster; and Kattrin (Jacqueline Joncas), her mute daughter. While peddling her wares over the course of several years, this mother and her family meet soldiers, a cook, a chaplain, a prostitute and a spy, and ultimately her children become direct or indirect casualties of the war she aimed to get rich on.“Mother Courage” is being produced and staged by Irondale at its space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a former Sunday school auditorium with chipped walls and giant plaques announcing the Beatitudes, which would have worked for this no-frills play if it weren’t undermined by what precedes it. Before the show, which has been marketed as an immersive experience, audience members can have a drink in the makeshift lobby set up with picnic tables; beer and soft pretzels, courtesy of DSK Brooklyn, are served from a cart in the corner. It’s meant to recall a biergarten, but is more a gimmick than an actual part of the show.In other words, it looks and feels like any other hipster hangout in Brooklyn.In his staging, Niesen retains Brecht’s title cards, the expository bits of narrative announcing what will transpire in each of the 12 scenes in this tedious two-and-a-half-hour epic.There are songs, too, as in Brecht’s original text — exegetic tunes that the characters break into — set to new music by Sam Day Harmet, who performs here with Erica Mancini and Stephen LaRosa. The score — incorporating banjo, guitar, drums, accordion and a synthesizer — begins with a war march before shooting into different genres, from bluegrass to ’80s synth pop and garage rock.The music’s too chic and eccentric for the production and the actors, who perform on, in and around an unsightly two-level scaffolding structure draped with blankets and curtains (scenic design is by Ken Rothchild).As for the actors: How can they be critiqued when Brecht wrote an unsentimental play with characters who aren’t meant to be empathized with, who don’t appeal to our hearts but our minds? Of the show’s central brood, the women are most memorable — Gilmore’s despicable Mother Courage and Joncas’s skittish Kattrin, who communicates through a series of fearsome croaks. The rest of the cast — all of whom play several characters — appear most comfortable when they tap into the production’s absurd sense of humor, such as Stephen Cross’s indulgent performance as a clucking, mischievous capon and Michael-David Gordon’s huffing and griping as a weary prostitute named Yvette. Many of the performances feel lethargic, and the cast awkwardly hiccups through the dialogue of even the smallest bits of improvised comedy.Niesen’s direction flattens an already challenging work of theater that, despite its influence, didn’t quite catch on in the United States, where agitprop and other kinds of homiletic plays are less popular. This “Mother Courage” feels like pedagogy encased in a bubble, isolated from, say, an overseas war — not to mention the political warmongering and consumptive capitalism in our own country.This production then reads as an indelicate transcription, because Brecht may be stone cold, but that doesn’t mean his work lacks spark. The spark of revolution, that is — though Brecht pioneered the Lehrstück, or “learning play,” his aim wasn’t just to educate but to incite audiences to make change in their society. He wanted his plays to “knock them into shape,” Brecht wrote. Unfortunately, this “Mother Courage” fails to pack a punch.Mother Courage and Her ChildrenThrough June 5 at Irondale, Brooklyn; irondale.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      When Britney Came to Brecht’s House

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      The Berliner Ensemble, once known for reverent productions of plays by its founder, Bertolt Brecht, has come roaring into a new decade.BERLIN — In August, the Berliner Ensemble started its season with a bang: a new production of “The Threepenny Opera” that was both an artistic triumph and a box-office smash.Since then, the theater, founded by Bertolt Brecht in what was once East Berlin, has been on a winning streak. This is quite a turnaround for a company that, until recently, was considered tame and even old-fashioned.Yet as of this season, the Berliner Ensemble is perhaps this city’s most consistently exciting playhouse, a place where repertory staples and new works are invigorated by extraordinary actors and innovative directors. Over a single weekend this month, I took in three very different new productions, out of a whopping 20 premieres planned for the season.Along with the new “Threepenny Opera,” the clearest indication of the course that the theater has charted was Christina Tscharyiski’s new version of Brecht’s “The Mother,” a Lehrstück, or “learning play,” from 1932 that the playwright intended to awaken both class consciousness and critical thinking about workers’ struggles.Tscharyiski expands on Brecht’s discussion of the exploitation and dehumanization of the proletariat by adding fresh texts that boldly bring the work into the 21st century. The six actors, playing a variety of roles, hold forth on capitalism’s relationship to feminism and digitization. If this sounds pedantic, I assure you that it is anything but.The production is subtitled “Instructions for a Revolution,” and its nimble players deliver their speeches with manifesto-like zeal. Yet there’s nothing dry or plodding about the production’s forays into theory, especially not with the backing of a rock band performing Hanns Eisler’s original music. And there’s nothing stiff about the eye-popping production, thanks to Janina Audick’s cheeky and colorful set, bare but for a few well-chosen signs and props, and Verena Dengler’s eclectic patchwork costumes.The ensemble in “The Mother — Instructions for a Revolution,” directed by Christina Tscharyiski.JR Berliner EnsembleTscharyiski, a young Austrian director, is the latest in a series of inventive artists who have been invited by the Berliner Ensemble’s artistic director, Oliver Reese, to establish a “new Brecht tradition at the house,” as he told The New York Times in August. In recent seasons, Reese has enlisted a number of progressive theatermakers to help remove the mothballs from a number of Brecht’s plays at the house, which has had a longstanding tradition of effective, if dated, stagings.This is Reese’s fifth season running Brecht’s old house, and the first under his leadership when the Berliner Ensemble has truly gained definition and focus.Beyond engaging distinctive young directors like Tscharyiski, who also oversaw a staggeringly wild production of Elfriede Jelinek’s “Schwarzwasser” earlier this season, and Ersan Mondtag, who has applied his neo-Expressionist gloss to works by Wagner and Brecht, the Berliner Ensemble’s current success is due largely to its troupe of 27 full-time actors, one of the largest in Germany’s theater system. Reese has made a point of casting shows from the company’s acting reserve. Four out of the six actors performing in “The Mother” belonged to the company’s ensemble. I encountered a dozen more house actors the following evening in Mateja Koleznik’s broodingly atmospheric production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” in which no fewer than a dozen ensemble members are part of the sizable cast.Miller’s allegory of the McCarthy witch hunts plays out on a fixed set whose wood panels and green tiles suggest the hallway of a Soviet-era school gymnasium or courthouse. In a program note, Koleznik writes that she conceived of the play’s setting not as Salem, Mass., in 1692 or America in 1953, but rather a “retro future dystopia” that recalls “The Handmaid’s Tale.”Her production achieves a remarkably effective mood of gothic menace, thanks largely to Raimund Orfeo Voigt’s handsome yet confining set, Ana Savic-Gecan’s severe costumes and Rainer Casper’s chiaroscuro lighting. Then there is Michael Gumpinger’s sinister music, chanted by a five-woman chorus credited as “the girls of Salem.” Clad in green schoolgirl uniforms, they loll in chairs, balance upside down and hang from doorways like acrobatic Balthus models.Having effectively established its horror atmosphere, however, the production has little to say about the play itself. Most of the actors, locked into the prison of this claustrophobic production, seem on their own when it comes to embodying Miller’s characters and their thorny relationships. Yet two ensemble members of different generations steal the show.Lili Epply in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” directed by Mateja Koleznik.Matthias HornBettina Hoppe, 47, makes for a tightly coiled Elisabeth Proctor. With modesty and restraint, she breathes convincing life into her pious character, whose fortitude and inner pain are the emotional core of the production. As her rival, Abigail Williams, the Proctors’ former maid and the ringleader of the “bewitched” girls, Lili Epply, 27, a new ensemble member, deftly shifts between the character’s various states — girlish, seductive, defensive, vindictive, and drunk on power — without ever hamming things up.After the vast panorama of “The Crucible,” with its 21 performers onstage, the focus narrowed again for the most unexpected entry of the weekend: “It’s Britney, Bitch,” a one-woman show for the actress Sina Martens, directed by Lena Brasch, that is both a homage to the pop star and a plea that we take Spears seriously. Ultimately, Marten presents the singer as more of a badass than a victim: “‘Toxic’ was way earlier than your ‘toxic masculinity,’” runs one memorable line.Alone onstage in the Werkraum, the company’s tiny supplementary venue, Martens sings, dances and even crawls her way through the 70-minute evening, donning a long blond Barbie wig or bald cap to slip in and out of the pop star’s skin. The dialogue is drawn from both Spears’s statements in court and freshly composed texts by four writers.One is an imagined missive — in language reminiscent of Kafka’s “Letter to His Father” — to Jamie Spears, who controlled much of his daughter’s personal and professional life during a 14-year conservatorship that was dissolved this past November. At other times, Martens grapples with Spears’s double role as a model of female empowerment and a symbol of a crassly sexist culture, reflecting on the news media’s fixation with her breasts and virginity. Why is it so difficult, Martens ponders in one monologue, for society to take female suffering seriously? “Janis Joplin didn’t die from melancholy,” she says. “Janis Joplin died from heroin.”Breaking up all the talk are arrangements of several Spears hits in all but unrecognizable versions by Friederike Bernhardt that turn the pop chartbusters into gloomy cabaret ballads. At the end of the evening, Martens appears in a red jumpsuit like the one Spears famously wore in the music video for “Oops … I Did It Again” to dance the original choreography while lip-syncing along with the pop anthem. Through their mandated masks, the compulsorily vaccinated audience members, sitting shoulder to shoulder, cheered Martens on. Like the Berliner Ensemble’s other new productions I attended, “It’s Britney, Bitch” was sold out: no mean feat in normal times, but little short of miraculous during the pandemic’s latest surge.Die Mutter — Anleitung für eine Revolution. Directed by Christina Tscharyiski. Berliner Ensemble. Through Feb. 11.Hexenjagd. Directed by Mateja Koleznik. Berliner Ensemble. In repertory.It’s Britney, Bitch. Directed by Lena Brasch. Berliner Ensemble. Through Feb. 27. More

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      Review: ‘The Mother’ Rises Up Again in the Name of Revolution

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      The Wooster Group’s production will prompt discussions about the company’s vision for Brecht’s “learning play.”There’s a bit of an echo when the actors in the Wooster Group’s production of “The Mother” speak. At first I assumed that their voices were being digitally filtered. This would have been par for the course for the company, whose longstanding affinity for technological wizardry is well known. And it would have been an ingenious idea for a Bertolt Brecht play, reinforcing the alienation effect the playwright sought by subtly reminding us we were watching a show.Soon, though, I realized it was wizardry of another kind: For much of the time the actors were miming their own recorded lines. Unlike Deirdre O’Connell’s performance in “Dana H.” on Broadway, where lip-syncing never gets in the way of a devastating emotional realism, the Woosters go for an arch theatricality in the service of the story’s agitprop roots. Since they mostly sing the show’s brief numbers live, I found myself looking out for the transitions between what was recorded and what was not.In Brecht’s “The Mother” — not to be confused with his own “Mother Courage and Her Children,” which it predates by seven years — an apolitical woman named Pelagea Vlasov (Kate Valk, magnetic as ever) is pulled into communist activism after her son (Gareth Hobbs) is jailed for fighting on behalf of factory workers.The show, first produced in Germany in 1932, was inspired by a 1906 Russian novel by Maxim Gorky and Brecht conceived it as a “learning play.” A narrator (Jim Fletcher) helpfully fills us in on the historical and literary background in a prologue, and pops up again at regular intervals to essentially provide footnotes. It’s as if we are watching a play and reading its CliffsNotes at the same time, extending the learning process to the directing style.The Wooster Group, now in its 46th year, has acquired a reputation for cerebral, often opaque productions, and it’s true that the company’s shows can be puzzling. This one, directed, like most of them, by Elizabeth LeCompte, is no exception. (It premiered in June at the Vienna Festival.)But the process often has a degree of transparency because the company is not shy about listing its sources and regularly uploads to its website a variety of informative videos, including excerpts from rehearsals, that help contextualize what audience members end up seeing. In one of the videos for “The Mother,” for example, Valk says that the company was attracted to the story of a woman who becomes radicalized in her 60s. It is hard not to think of LeCompte, 77, and Valk, 65, who continue to explore theater with an energy and inquisitiveness people a third of their age might envy.It might be fair to say (warn?) that some of the Wooster Group shows, like its head-scratching “Hamlet,” in which they repurposed Richard Burton’s performance from 1964, can be less involving to experience than to discuss with your friends in a doomed attempt to figure out what the company was trying to do.And so it goes with “The Mother.” The production both hews to the original text and honors the theatrical traditions that birthed it, and then it tweaks them. Hanns Eisler’s original score is sometimes juxtaposed with a new one by Amir ElSaffar, for example, and in some scenes ElSaffar’s jazzy music combines with the actors’ staccato delivery to create something akin to a 1930s Warner Bros. noir about the workers’ struggle. Why the Woosters went for that effect — well, we could meet over a drink and talk about it for a few hours.The MotherThrough Nov. 6 at the Performing Garage, Manhattan; thewoostergroup.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘The Threepenny Opera’ Returns Home, Liberated

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      Barrie Kosky’s new production for the Berliner Ensemble, at the theater where the famous work premiered, knows where to break the rules.BERLIN — “I’m not asking for an opera here,” the notorious criminal Macheath says at his wedding, early in a work that happens to be called “Die Dreigroschenoper” (“The Threepenny Opera”).And in Barrie Kosky’s hauntingly enjoyable new production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s famous “play with music” for the Berliner Ensemble — at the theater where it premiered in 1928 — Macheath then reaches into the orchestra pit in search of nuptial entertainment and steals the “Threepenny” score from the conductor’s stand. He flips through the pages while humming the show’s big hit, “Mack the Knife,” tears them up and throws the scraps into a metal bucket. Then he lights them on fire.The line “I’m not asking for an opera here” dates back to the ’20s, but Weill and Brecht never wrote what follows — nor did their essential collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann, who with this production is finally getting proper billing alongside them after decades of neglect. Yet this kind of ironic gesture toward the art form wouldn’t be out of character for them; coming from Kosky, it’s a subtle tribute, and a blazing declaration of independence.It’s a moment, along with many others in Kosky’s production that epitomizes the adage of knowing rules in order to break them.Kosky clearly understands the work: the social critiques that course through Brecht and Hauptmann’s crass text; the ways in which Weill’s earworm score lodges those ideas in your mind; and how, in its tension between words and music, “Threepenny” dares you to connect with it emotionally amid constant reminders of theatrical artifice.He also seems to know that “Threepenny” is ultimately a problem piece. It may be the defining artwork of Weimar-era Berlin, but more often than not it makes for a joyless night at the theater. Its dizzying layers of satire and style tend to overwhelm directors, who as if operating with a Wikipedia understanding easily succumb to visual clichés, vicious affect and didacticism. The worst productions aspire to the sexily somber Berlin of Sam Mendes’s take on the musical “Cabaret.”But “Threepenny” isn’t, as Kosky said in an interview with The New York Times, “‘Cabaret’ with a little bit of intellectualism.” Indeed, it was quintessentially 1920s Berlin — a timely tale, despite its setting of London’s criminal underworld in the 19th century, that became a pop culture phenomenon known as “Threepenny fever” — but its legacy is far richer and more widespread than that. Especially after the 1950s, once the show found belated success in the United States with a long-running adaptation by the composer Marc Blitzstein.Covers of “Mack the Knife” abounded, and made for one of Ella Fitzgerald’s greatest live recordings; Brecht’s poetic lyrics influenced Bob Dylan; the artist Nan Goldin named her photography collection “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” after one of the show’s songs. And the metatheatrical devices of “Threepenny” are alive and well: In Leos Carax’s new film, “Annette,” emotion and artifice fit snugly together in a deliberate tension you could trace back to Brecht and Weill.Even so, the vitality of “Threepenny” depends on intervention and adaptation; it can never be performed, as it too often has been, as a museum piece. And Kosky never treats it as one. Instead he adds and subtracts, breathing new life into a work that desperately needed it. He sheds the excesses of Act I and eliminates entire characters, for example, to reveal a recognizable but freshly presented story focused on that most fundamental of human dramas: love.Capitalism, and Brecht’s scathing indictment of it, still loom over the show — but more obliquely, as an insidious force behind relationships that renders them slippery and unreliable. In Kosky’s view, it also feeds and thwarts Macheath’s pathological need to be loved, whether by his fellow characters or the members of the audience.Nico Holonics portrayed Macheath with a weariness that betrays the darkness behind his carefree demeanor. Joerg Brueggemann/OstkreuzMacheath, a.k.a. Mack the Knife — performed by Nico Holonics with unflappable joy but a weariness that betrays the darkness behind his carefree demeanor — is not a man to give up his habits, as he is described in the show. He gives away wedding rings as if they were pennies, and smiles as he watches women fight over him. Like Don Giovanni, he never loses faith in his ability to manipulate them, even as they abandon him one by one.He is introduced, as ever, with “Mack the Knife” (following the overture, here lithe yet lyrical in chorale-like passages, conducted by Adam Benzwi). Through a curtain of black tinsel, a sparkling face appears — that of Josefin Platt as the Moon Over Soho, a role created for Kosky’s production — to sing the murder ballad with the rapid vibrato of Lotte Lenya, Weill’s wife and a legendary interpreter of his music.Kosky is a showman — just look at the invaluable work he has done to revive Weimar-era operettas at his company here in Berlin, the Komische Oper — and he knows the power of a hit song. So he reprises “Mack the Knife” throughout the evening, at one point having its tune played through one of the souvenir music boxes tourists can buy in his nearby hometown, Dessau.In general, Kosky seems to have more of an affinity for Weill’s music, which he expands with relish, than the text. Where he truly defers to Brecht — his production, after all, is for Brecht’s company — is in the staging, which shatters the fourth wall from the start and continually reminds its audience, in anti-Wagnerian fashion, that what they are seeing isn’t real.Polly Peachum, here a commanding Cynthia Micas, calls for her own spotlight and gestures for the curtain to be raised, revealing a jungle gym of a set (by Rebecca Ringst) that is more dynamic than it at first appears; Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum (the darkly charming Tilo Nest), Polly’s father and Macheath’s underworld rival, cues the orchestra; stagehands make no effort to hide their work.The effect, in Brecht’s school of theater, is to temper the audience’s emotional response and trigger an intellectual one — which is crucial to the political success of “Threepenny,” yet is often difficult to reconcile with the seductive grip of Weill’s music. That can get messy, but Kosky’s production comfortably has it both ways; the result may not please purists of Brecht or Weill, but on balance it makes for persuasive, satisfying drama.And by homing in on Macheath, Kosky allows room for psychological richness, particularly with the women in his orbit: Polly; her mother, Celia Peachum (lent the authority of a power broker by Constanze Becker); Jenny (arguably the soul of the show, wistful and bitter as sung by Bettina Hoppe); and Lucy Brown (Laura Balzer, a master of physical and musical comedy). You could also count among them Lucy’s father, the police chief Tiger Brown, here performed by Kathrin Wehlisch in drag — not a gimmick, but a homoerotic treatment of Macheath’s oldest friendship as yet another fragile romance.From left, Cynthia Micas, Constanze Becker and Tilo Nest as the Peachum family.JR Berliner EnsembleAll these relationships fail — usually because of money, in some way. But Macheath is undeterred, by the end looking for his next connection as a brightly lit sign descends from the rafters: “LOVE ME.” That’s another Brechtian touch, a modern take on the projections used in Caspar Neher’s set for the original 1928 production.But what follows is all Kosky. After the winkingly jubilant finale, the Moon Over Soho shows its face again, bleakly sending off the audience with a “Mack the Knife” verse, written by Brecht in 1930, that says some people are in the dark, and some are in the light; and while you can see those in the light, you’ll never see the ones in the dark.Die DreigroschenoperThrough Sept. 4, then in repertory, at the Berliner Ensemble, Berlin; berliner-ensemble.de. More

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      ‘The Threepenny Opera,’ Without the ‘Cabaret’ Clichés

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      Don’t expect bowler hats and dirty negligees in a new production at the Berliner Ensemble, the theater Bertolt Brecht founded.BERLIN — This winter, after live performances had made a modest return in Germany, the coronavirus pandemic brought them to another halt.But at the Berliner Ensemble in January, preparations were underway for a highly anticipated new staging of “The Threepenny Opera.” That “play with music” by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill had its 1928 premiere in the company’s house, and became the city’s most famous music theater export — and perhaps the most iconic cultural artifact of Weimar-era Berlin.“I am working behind Bertolt Brecht’s wooden production desk!” said Barrie Kosky, the production’s Australian director, with some astonishment.Although the cast had been rehearsing for eight weeks, no one could say when opening night would be. “The only good thing for me, personally, that’s come out of corona is that I’ve had more time onstage than I’ve ever had to put on a show,” Kosky said.Seven months later, this “Threepenny Opera” is finally set for an Aug. 13 premiere; it will then enter the repertoire of the Berliner Ensemble, which was founded by Brecht and the actress Helene Weigel, his wife. But don’t expect Weimar-era clichés like bowler hats, dirty negligees and tableaus out of Otto Dix or George Grosz.“This piece cannot be ‘Cabaret’ with a little bit of intellectualism,” Kosky said.“We are beyond ‘Babylon Berlin,’” chimed in Oliver Reese, the Berliner Ensemble’s artistic director, who was sitting across from Kosky during the interview.Kosky, 54, is best known for his energetic productions at the nearby Komische Oper, the opera company where he has been the artistic director since 2012. Among his biggest hits there have been deliriously overstuffed, razzle-dazzle stagings of operettas and musicals, including many forgotten works of the Weimar Republic.But now that he’s directing that era’s defining piece, he’s taking a different approach.During a dress rehearsal in January, the actors sang and danced on an industrial set whose welded metal ladders and platforms resembled a treacherous labyrinth or adult jungle gym; there were no references to the decadence of 1920s Berlin. Instead, the sardonic, acid-laced tone of the piece came through in a dark and psychologically probing production that appeared abstract and timeless.Christina Drechsler and Stefan Kurt in Robert Wilson’s production of “The Threepenny Opera,” which the Berliner Ensemble performed more than 300 times.Lieberenz/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesAlan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper in “The Threepenny Opera” at Studio 54 in New York, in 2006.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, which has been home to the Berliner Ensemble since 1949. Bertolt Brecht was the company’s first artistic director.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesThe Berliner Ensemble’s previous “Threepenny Opera” staging, by Robert Wilson, was a stylized tip of the hat to German Expressionism. It was one of the theater’s signature productions and ran for over a decade, with more than 300 performances. (It came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in 2011.) But it required many actors from outside the company, which made mounting it a challenge. Shortly after Reese arrived to lead the house in 2017, he approached Kosky about creating a new production cast exclusively with actors from the ensemble.It was an offer Kosky couldn’t turn down.“It was the same antenna that went out when Katharina Wagner rang me,’” Kosky said, referring Richard Wagner’s great-granddaughter and the director of the Bayreuth Festival, who invited him to stage “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” there in 2017.“If you’re going to do ‘Meistersinger,’ then where else do you do it but Bayreuth? And if you’re going to do ‘Dreigroschenoper,’ where else do you do it except the Berliner Ensemble?” Kosky said, using the German title of “Threepenny.”With its uneasy blend of genres and source materials — it is based on an 18th-century British popular opera, and Brecht also incorporated lyrics from other poets into the text — “Threepenny” is a tricky work to pull off convincingly. The most recent Broadway production, from 2006, was a coke-fueled 1980s bacchanal starring Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper that was a critical flop.A rehearsal for “The Threepenny Opera” at the Berliner Ensemble with, from left: the actors Kathrin Wehlisch and Denis Riffel; Adam Benzwi, the production’s music director; and Barrie Kosky.Joerg Brueggemann/OstkreuzMuch of what makes “Threepenny” unique, and uniquely challenging for a director, can be traced back its origins. Brecht and Weill spent 10 days in the south of France hashing it out, working with a German translation of John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera” by Elisabeth Hauptmann — a collaborator and mistress of Brecht’s who, according to the Brecht scholar John Fuegi, was ultimately responsible for 80 percent of the “Threepenny” text.The creators, Kosky said, “didn’t even know exactly what they were writing, because it was written very quickly.” Although Weill later claimed that they had been trying all along to create a “new genre,” both Kosky and Reese felt that much of the show was the result of trial and error. The rushed nature of the collaboration, they said, resulted in something that doesn’t fit any one style.“It is a kind of bastard,” Reese said.“A schizophrenic bastard,” Kosky added. “But that’s the joy of it. It’s a tap dance through theatrical styles.”The rehearsal period for the premiere of “The Threepenny Opera” is the stuff of theatrical legend: calamities worthy of a screwball comedy. But after a month of cast illnesses and walkouts, and faulty sets and props — the barrel organ used for “Mack the Knife,” malfunctioned on opening night — the show opened, and was an immediate hit. All of Berlin was whistling Weill’s melodies, and lines for tickets wound around the block.But despite the fame the play has enjoyed in the 93 years since, Kosky called it a “problematic masterpiece” whose meaning is far from clear. Much of the ambiguity stems from the curious, even lopsided, interplay between the libretto and the score, he said.“Is it a farce with music, as Weill maintained?” Kosky asked. “Or is it a biting anticapitalist satire, as Brecht retrospectively claimed? And what is chief, the text or the music?”Every production of “Threepenny,” he added, “tries to do the impossible: to work out what the conundrum with this piece is, and the contradictions within the text, music and content.”Adam Benzwi, the American conductor who is the production’s music director, said he felt a definite tension between the critical distance that Brecht’s text invites and the emotional immediacy of Weill’s songs. The music, he said, must remain beautiful despite the harshness of the lyrics.“Weill’s music is unique because you immediately feel the pain, excitement and sexiness of urban life,” Benzwi said in a recent phone interview, pointing to the composer’s “melodies that want to be warm in a place that doesn’t allow that, rhythms that want to be happy when describing something terrible.”In January, Kosky said, “If Bertolt Brecht had asked another composer to do the music, we would probably have a much drier, easier piece to understand.”“But,” he added, “Weill opened up an emotional landscape where suddenly you are contradicting virtually everything that Brecht wants, or believes in, in theater.” (It’s a tension that would ultimately lead the dissolution of Brecht and Weill’s partnership in 1931, though they did reunite for “The Seven Deadly Sins” a couple of years later.)Cynthia Micas, as Polly Peacham, and Holonics.JR Berliner EnsembleUnder previous artistic directors, the Berliner Ensemble had developed a reputation for traditional, even worshipful, presentations of Brecht’s plays. Kosky is the latest in a series of innovative directors that Reese has invited to put their own spin on the works of the theater’s genius loci.“We’re trying to establish a new Brecht tradition at this house,” Reese said.“I think you don’t have to stick to the theory anymore,” he added, referring to Brecht’s stage philosophy, which despite its influence on 20th century theater is now approaching 100 years old. Brecht’s most famous technique, the alienation effect, is a push and pull between emotional involvement and critical reflection that is often achieved through ironic or metatheatrical means.Although Kosky is steering clear of Weimar-era imagery for his “Threepenny Opera,” he said he had been inspired by one of the period’s great comic filmmakers, Ernst Lubitsch — but also, perhaps more surprisingly, the much-darker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the enfant terrible of New German Cinema.Kosky said he was trying to bring together “the loneliness and melancholy of those isolated characters in Fassbinder’s films” with the “wonderful, naughty, Lubitsch quickness, irony and lightness.”“It’s a weird combination,” he admitted, adding he was aware that his artistic choices might not please everyone. But he doesn’t mind a bit of controversy.“I’m sure some people will say that I have ignored the savage social satire,” Kosky said, but insisted his production would be “political in a different way,” adding: “This is a piece about love in capitalism, and how love is for sale. It’s about the triumph of bourgeois hypocrisy.”For many, Weill’s score remains the soundtrack of its era, while Brecht’s portrait of a corrupt society captures the spirit of Berlin on the edge of an abyss. Even so, Kosky wants to roll back the show’s local associations in favor of something with broader resonance.“I think people will think my production smells like Berlin,” he said, “but the images that you see could be anywhere in the world.” More

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      Kurt Weill’s Path From Europe to Broadway Was a Straight Line

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      Weill’s early, Weimar-era works reveal the qualities that found a natural home in his golden age American musicals.Kurt Weill is often described as if he were two composers. One spun quintessential sounds of Weimar-era Berlin in works like “The Threepenny Opera,” and the other wrote innovative earworms for Broadway’s golden age. His career was bifurcated, so the story goes — split not only by a shift in style, but also by the Atlantic Ocean, when he fled Nazi Germany and eventually settled in the United States.Yet it’s possible to trace an unbroken line from Weill’s earliest works, as a teenager, to his final projects for the American stage, before his death in 1950. This path is evident in a recent wave of streamed performances — from his hometown, Dessau, as well as from Berlin, Milan and elsewhere — that together form a rough survey of his European output and reveal a spongy mind, a desire for novelty and a steady progression toward simplicity that found a natural home in his pathbreaking Broadway musicals.The oldest piece on offer came, appropriately, from Dessau, where Weill was born in 1900. Today it’s a dreary town in the former East Germany, but it has a rich cultural heritage: The Kurt Weill Center is inside one of the Masters’ Houses of the Bauhaus school, which is a local landmark and a venue for the annual Kurt Weill Festival. That celebration went online this year, with events including a spirited recital by the young pianist Frank Dupree.Between duets with the trumpeter Simon Höfele, Dupree played “Intermezzo,” a short piano solo from 1917, before Weill had studied with the likes of Engelbert Humperdinck and Ferruccio Busoni or worked under the conductor Hans Knappertsbusch. You can already hear, in this tender work, a gift for melody, as well as the textural sophistication of Brahms.Music history looms over Weill’s early efforts. The First Symphony (1921) — recently streamed by the Berlin Philharmonic under its chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko — reflects the energetic enthusiasm of a student absorbing works of the post-Wagnerian generation, with an expressionistic nod to Schoenberg and a debt to Mahler. But it has more than a classroom sense of craft; Petrenko made a persuasive case for how tautly constructed and delicately balanced the symphony is within its uninterrupted, chaotic 25 minutes.Kirill Petrenko conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a recent livestream of Weill’s First Symphony.Monika Rittershaus, via Berliner PhilharmonikerAt the same time, Weill was also showing an interest in popular styles, such as in “Langsamer Fox und Algi-Song” — a textbook cabaret number that was charmingly arranged by Dupree for piano and trumpet in his Dessau program. It foreshadows Weill’s embrace of the lowbrow, which he bent to ironic and politically charged effect in “The Threepenny Opera.” But that was still some years off, and until then, his music carried traces of fashionable atonality, with a teeming urge for originality that came out in works like the Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra, written in 1924 and featured in a stream by the Berlin Philharmonic’s Karajan Academy.Despite the title, the concerto is also written for percussion and double basses; nonetheless, it’s a gambit of orchestration, pitting a string soloist against an ensemble of much louder instruments. The Karajan musicians and the conductor Marie Jacquot — joined by the coolly able violinist Kolja Blacher — may have played with a timidity that paled some of the piece’s wit. But overall, they validated the claim of the musicologist Kim Kowalke, the president of the Kurt Weill Foundation and author of the landmark study “Kurt Weill in Europe,” that “nowhere is the acuity of the ear more apparent than in the orchestration of the concerto.”Elsewhere — such as in “Der Neue Orpheus,” a cantata for soprano and violin soloists — Weill proved a master of balancing disparate voices, with a keen ear for precise orchestration. It’s why his works from the 1920s rarely call for a large ensemble — and perhaps why so many of them, normally neglected for their modest scale, have been programmed during the pandemic.One that remains overlooked is the short comic opera “Der Zar Lässt Sich Photographieren” (“The Czar Has His Photograph Taken”), written in 1927 and the embodiment of the mocking question Busoni is said to have asked Weill: “What do you want to become, a Verdi of the poor?” (To which Weill responded, “Is that so bad?”) It’s easy entertainment but also revolutionary, not least for its use of a prerecorded tango played onstage from a gramophone.The dramatic works that have recently been staged, however, are significant as well. In Milan, the Teatro alla Scala paired “The Seven Deadly Sins” with “Mahagonny Songspiel,” Weill’s first collaboration with Bertolt Brecht (and the raw ingredients for their full-length opera “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”). Weill’s music was already moving away from its flirtation with atonality, toward deceptive simplicity and a wholesale adoption of dance and jazz idioms; his goal was nothing less than the reformation of music theater.From left, Elliott Carlton Hines, Michael Smallwood, Kate Lindsey, Andrew Harris, Matthäus Schmidlechner and Lauren Michelle in the Teatro alla Scala’s double bill of “The Seven Deadly Sins” and “Mahagonny Songspiel.”via Teatro alla ScalaWeill sought out partnerships with the playwrights and poets he considered the best of their time. He had admired Brecht’s collection “Die Hauspostille,” as well as a radio broadcast of “Mann Ist Mann.” Though they had different temperaments, and were ultimately incompatible, the pair created some of the definitive artworks of Weimar-era Berlin, in which Weill’s music reached its most potent, most subversive political power.Irina Brook’s staging of “Mahagonny Songspiel” for La Scala — conducted clearly if slowly by Riccardo Chailly and featuring the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey and the soprano Lauren Michelle — was an imaginatively scrappy reflection of the New York Times critic Olin Downes’s report from the 1927 premiere, which he described as “a clever and savage skit on the degeneration of society, the triumph of sensualism, the decay of art.”Chailly’s foot-dragging interpretation, which didn’t put enough trust in the music’s dancing rhythms and tempos, is a common problem among Weill performances today. Members of the Berlin Philharmonic came close, but ultimately fell short, in playing the jubilant fox trot “Berlin im Licht” (1928) and the “Threepenny” suite “Kleine Dreigroschenmusik” (1929) in one concert, and Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg’s suite from the “Mahagonny” opera, imprecisely conducted by Thomas Sondergard, in another. Contrast these performances with Dupree’s rollicking arrangement of “Berlin im Licht,” whose smiling spirit wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1920s nightclub.“Kleine Dreigroschenmusik” in particular reveals how the liveliness of dance is essential to a Weill performance. The music has to be enjoyable, even while sticking its tongue out at you; that’s the sly magic of its politics, the triumph of Weill and Brecht’s partnership, admired to this day by composers like David Lang. Otherwise, the piece risks being weighty and ponderous — in other words, no fun.An energetic interpretation can lift even the less successful of Weill and Brecht’s projects. Take “Happy End” (1929) — loved by neither man, but nevertheless packed with hits including “Bilbao-Song” and “Surabaya-Johnny.” For the Brecht Festival, in Augsburg, Germany, the actress Winnie Böwe, joined by Felix Kroll on accordion, salvaged the show by presenting “Happy End für Eilige,” a breathless abridgment that cleverly repurposed the script’s bite in touches like singing the mocking hymn “Hosiannah Rockefeller” from inside an apse.Weill and Brecht parted ways while preparing a revised “Mahagonny” for its Berlin run in 1931. But they were reunited in their exile following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Weill had fled to Paris not long after “Der Silbersee,” which features one of his finest European scores, became a target of Nazi demonstrations and was banned. In his new city, he quickly received a commission from George Balanchine’s Les Ballets 1933.It became “The Seven Deadly Sins,” a “ballet chanté” that tells the story of two sisters — one singing, one dancing — who set out from Louisiana hoping to make enough money in the big city to build their family a little home on the Mississippi River. It’s a bitter tale, prone to aggressive interpretations. But at La Scala, Lindsey struck a balance of ironic beauty and grittier outbursts held in reserve for maximal effect. In Amsterdam, the Dutch National Opera presented its own virtual “Sins,” starring Eva-Maria Westbroek, who approached the role with a sort of generic elegance fascinatingly at odds with unhinged acting, intensified by the multicamera production’s kinetic close-ups and harsh lighting.Eva-Maria Westbroek in the Dutch National Opera’s multicamera production of “The Seven Deadly Sins.”Sanne PeperThere is some of the “Sins” score in Weill’s Second Symphony, which was written at the same time and premiered in 1934. Performed by the Karajan Academy alongside the violin concerto, this symphony is more focused than its 1921 predecessor in the genre, but is also composed with a straightforward language better suited to dramatic than concert works. It’s likable, but to what end?That’s a question you could ask of much of Weill’s music from this interlude between Berlin and Broadway. His inclination to novelty is reflected more in chameleonic adaptation than in innovation. Members of the Berlin Philharmonic recently played “Suite Panaméenne,” which is adapted from “Marie Galante” (1934), a show whose music is clearly eager to be loved — and was, especially the tango “Youkali” and the chanson “J’Attends un Navire,” which became something of an anthem for the French Resistance. There is a confidence and an unpretentious ease in these songs, but they behave like the work of a tunesmith. “J’Attends un Navire” doesn’t sound ironically French, the way schmaltz is skewered in “Mahagonny” as “eternal art”; it just sounds authentically French.But the hallmarks of this period in Weill’s life — high standards for collaborative partners, a knack for internalizing diverse styles, an ear for unforgettable melodies — would soon serve him well in the United States. Some of his best work was still to come: setting Ira Gershwin’s lyrics in “Lady in the Dark”; blending opera and Broadway with Langston Hughes in “Street Scene”; pioneering the concept musical with Alan Jay Lerner in “Love Life.”He just had to get there first. That opportunity would come a year after “Marie Galante,” when Weill left for New York and a project with a fitting provisional title: “The Road of Promise.” More