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Isaac Mizrahi created the costumes here, in a smorgasbord of salacious styles, from a cleavage-flashing Chanel-style suit to the 'Blue Angel'-style chanteuse get-ups worn by Ms. (Jason Lyons did the lighting, which allows for Brechtian signage to be writ in neon and L.C.D. And for a copulatory free-for-all brothel sequence, the participants' underwear glows luridly beneath a black light. Macheath's friendship with Tiger Brown (Christopher Innvar), Lucy's father and the chief of police, is of the crotch-grabbing, kissing kind. But in this case Lucy is a man, who makes a point of showing the audience exactly what lies beneath his skirt. McKay) and Lucy Brown (Brian Charles Rooney). Macheath again finds himself torn between two brides: the demi-virginal Polly Peachum (Ms. Lauper as Jenny), but also their male counterparts. So in this version Macheath's love interests include not only the usual component of female whores (most notably Ms.

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Elliott has chosen to make full use of a freedom from censorship that Brecht could only have envied. Writing of its Broadway premiere in The New York Times, Lewis Nichols described it as 'a gently mad evening in the theater for those who like their spades in the usual nomenclature of the earnest.' It wasn't until the fabled Off Broadway revival at the Theater de Lys in 1954 - with Weill's widow, Lotte Lenya, as the prostitute Jenny - that 'Threepenny' achieved popular success in Manhattan. The music, Brecht wrote, was meant to become 'an active collaborator in the stripping bare of the middle-class corpus of ideas.'Īn immediate, scandalous hit in Europe, 'Threepenny' failed to generate the same frissons when it first arrived in New York in 1933. Using deliberately artificial techniques - painted signs, scene-setting titles, spoken asides and musical-hall songs that often had little to do with the immediate plot - the play was designed to sustain an intellectual distance, to allow audiences to see their own reflections in vicious thugs, whores, beggars and policemen motivated by the same primal needs and instincts as themselves. But the show's real satiric targets were the middle classes of poverty-crippled, rudderless Germany in the 1920's.

This is one party where the hangover begins almost as soon as the evening does.Ĭreated in the era in which 'Cabaret' was set, 'The Threepenny Opera' remains the most famous and popular example of what Brecht called 'epic theater.' Inspired by John Gay's rollicking 'Beggar's Opera' (1728), 'Threepenny' translated the tale of the villainous but irresistible Macheath and his marauders into the age of Queen Victoria. There's one big difference: nobody in the current incarnation of those days of swine and poses seems to be having any fun. (Or was it Liz?) All of this is once again on tap via the Roundabout Theater Company. There's even a bare-chested hunk in a gold lamé bathing suit who arrives on a flying golden horse, summoning sweet memories of that fab birthday party for Bianca. Why right now - on the very spot where Halston, Liza, Bianca and Andy once held sybaritic court - you can watch the same kinds of revels they might have witnessed in the 1970's, thanks to the shrill, numbing revival of 'The Threepenny Opera' that opened at the theater at Studio 54 last night.Ĭross-dressed men and women in writhing sexual pretzels leather boys and glitter queens vacuuming up piles of snow with their nostrils strobe lights, neon lights and, yes, disco-ball lights. AND you thought those crazy, hazy nights when Studio 54 sizzled were strictly a thing of the past.