Yes, that someone is Mack the Knife

Mack the Knife is stalking the stage again, this time at the Eastside Theater.  Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "Threepenny Opera" opened last Thursday evening, and will run Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays through March 16.

The "opera" takes place in the Soho district of London.  Its characters are panhandlers, pimps, prostitutes, common criminals and crooked cops.

Jonathan Peachum runs an establishment which outfits beggars to keep them up with the times, because, though the rich have created most of the world's misery, they cannot bear to look at it.

All human beings, however, no matter how sensitive, quickly grow immune to any one kind of misery.  Confronted for the first time by a blind beggar a man may throw him a shilling.  The second time he is more likely to throw him a sixpence and the third time he will probably throw him in jail.  So Peachum provides beggars with variety.

His daughter Polly, to his great dismay, has fallen in love with Macheath (Mack the knife), a criminal who manages to be dashing in a cheap sort of way.  Polly marries Mack, and Peachum and his wife decide to do their best to bring Mack to the gallows.

They do, on the day of the coronation, but just before the trap door is supposed to open, a mounted messenger from the Queen gives Mack a pardon and a pension of 10,000 pounds a year for the rest of his life.  The happy ending is obviously a joke, and Peachum tells the audience that it is the plight of the poor that there are no mounted messengers.

The opera is extremely enjoyable as entertainment, but it is more than that.  Always present is Brecht's pessimism, never more than thinly veiled, and often a direct statement:  "Gentleman, do not be taken in; man lives exclusively by mortal sin."

The poor are more pathetic than funny, so the laughs are often painful,and the play operates on one level as a plea from the poor that "until you fill our bellies right and wrong have no meaning."  The happy ending (and all of the humor) is blunted by the last line, about "this bastard world, still lacking form, and void."

Half of the first act had passed before the play found itself, but once it had gotten to its feet it stayed on them and kept moving.  Richard Ashford and Billie Nickell are very good as Peachum and his wife.  Sharon Lohmar is impressive when she plants her feet, puts her hands on her hips, throws her head and shoulders back and sings about "Pirate Jenny," and "yes," "no" and "whether."  The harmonium player has class--she both plays and smokes her cigar with grace.

None of the actors can sing really well, and some of them can't act very well, but somehow I got more involved in the "Threepenny Opera" than I have in anything else for quite a while.  See it if you can.