Don’t believe anyone who tells you that Man’s obsession with sin and turmoil stems from morbid fascination; the real reason he loves atrocity is the very paradox of his own love of comfort. Man idealizes a life of ease and good feeling that is enduring and flawless, yet the comforts he devises for himself are ultimately and utterly limitations. If a man sits shivering and cold in the rain, his true desire is to be one with nature, to have leather skin, to sprout gills; lacking the ability to thus adapt, he builds himself a house and crafts windows through which to stare at the element he couldn’t conquer. If he only wants to see, say, 127 Hours, he is really imagining a false reality in which he himself can be comfortable losing an arm, suspending the need to endure.
Bertolt Brecht, being a Marxist and possessing much of the ideology’s revolutionary spirit, taps into Man’s impulse unto villainy in the way of the common man: the song-and-dance show! The Threepenny Opera, penned by Brecht and Kurt Weill, and appearing at the Hart House Theatre thanks to the UC Follies, is a circus sideshow of life’s idolated immoralities, of whores and killers and beggars, parading through the proscenium.
And how do the UC Follies players pull it off? Well, suffice it to say, this production runs amiss when it proves to be a little too comfortable. The Weimarian Soho they’ve constructed onstage is impressive, but so much so that it seems to dwarf its cast’s attempts to inhabit it. Admittedly, The Threepenny Opera is driven almost entirely by its leading cast, and in many cases they excel. One must here extend honours to the tremendous performances of Polly Peachum (Nicole Stawikowski) and the infamous anti-hero of popular song, Mack the Knife (Michael-David Blostein).
Polly, Mackie’s wife, and otherwise the Opera’s ditzy, porny, blonde is no dunce in Stawikowski’s hands. Polly has a second, conniving face to her princess-poise, one Stawikowski plays so well that one cannot help but laugh when the cracks show in the veneer. Mackie Messer is a complex villain, as despicable as he is charming, a man completely safe inside his own animalism, recognizing it as the necessary reaction to his own poverty. Since both hatefulness and charisma are qualities of the soul, they are nigh-impossible traits to play well as an actor, but Blostein succeeds tremendously. He is the funniest man on the stage, all the funnier because the comedy is just a mask for something authentically cruel. He stabs a man and pauses to change his gloves, at once so sinister and so comic that you can’t help but hope he doesn’t hang.
The remaining performances, however, lack lustre. The Peachums, the guards, the thieves; they are all funny, but in the scope of the play their performances come off as rather quaint. This poses as a problem when a play clocks in three hours in length. The players’ performance is too loose to in the scope of The Threepenny Opera, and it doesn’t help that a good portion of the play’s action takes place inside a prison cell that completely obscures the sight lines. Meanwhile, the orchestra clambers through Weill’s famous score ham-fistedly — too understated to revel in the sheer bombast of the play’s mock-caberet.
Brecht and Weill’s production, when performed to its potential is raving, wild and uninhibited, an indulgent foray into the insidious, the two-faced and the debauched. Yet no matter how high they hike up their skirts, the Follies seem to fall short of the necessary kind of depraved abandon. Still, the UC Follies’ The Threepenny Opera makes for boisterous entertainment.
