San Francisco Classical Voice

Perloff, with her special touch for music drama (from musicals to opera), pulled together a cast of mostly "straight actors," who somehow manage to sing and dance up a storm (aided by amplification, alas), under the care of music director Constantine Kitsopoulos and choreographer John Carrafa.

Just as Perloff belongs in an opera house, Walt Spangler's spectacular multifunctional unit set should make a major opera company proud. With huge, gleaming metal trusses and a full-length staircase, the play's two settings (Bill's Beer Hall and the Salvation Army Mission) inhabit the same space as the staircase is moved from one location to another — similar to the Bayreuth Flying Dutchman where the same structure served, convincingly, as the harbor and the inside of Senta's home.

It's fortunate that the male lead doesn't have a big musical number because Peter Macon — scary-good that he is in the role of Bill Cracker — is not much of a crooner. His love interest (so to speak), Lieutenant Lillian of the Salvation Army, has all the singin'.

Charlotte Cohn, the Musetta from the "Broadway Boheme," put her all into "The Sailors' Tango" and "Surabaya Johnny." Outstanding singing — different in its professional, perhaps excessively singerly quality — came from Linda Mugleston, in the role of the Fly, the mysterious Lady in Grey who runs the gang. Extra material, in the form of "The Ballad of the Pirates," from Weill's 1928 song "Die Muschel von Margate," was interpolated into the show to give Mugleston her "entrance aria," and she made the most of it.

The large ensemble cast features some of the top ACT regulars, including René Augesen, Steven Anthony Jones, Charles Dean, and Dan Hiatt. It was a special pleasure to see Jack Willis (back from his star turns in The Black Rider and as Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), as Sam Wurlitzer, the "Mammy" of the gang, in an appropriate, large dress. Human turbine Justin Leath, from the ACT master of fine arts program class of 2007, paired up beautifully with Willis as Baby Face.

Kitsopoulos' consistently "uptempo" music direction is the result of thought and preparation. Coming from an operatic background, but with extensive work in musical theater, Kitsopoulos laments in the program notes that "an awful lot of people have recorded Weill's music and distorted it ... they tend to play and sing his music much more slowly than it's written." The same is true about Puccini, he adds — performers stretch out the music "because it sounds like it should be romantic, so the slower the better, right?"

Instead of the "Melachrino-Mantovani lush/slow sound," Kitsopoulos' Happy End is lean and mean — and fast, the result of "actually looking at what he wrote in the score, in the tempo markings and dynamics and breaks ... and do[ing] my very best to follow those specifically."

Perloff's direction is functional and effective, as usual — especially appealing in not calling attention to the Director and the act of Directing — but opening night didn't go as smoothly as this production is likely to appear in the future. Cohesion and fluidity were not always present. There were many tiny pauses in the text and movement, not enough to create a problem, but noticeable nevertheless.

The big-show finale made the audience forget whatever misgivings there might have been before. Perfectly manic, or rather, maniacally perfect, this was a memorable Broadway moment, everyone in motion, as the stormy "Hosannah" chorus rang out. Its cutting irony, and political agenda, show why Brecht retained ownership of the lyrics, even after dissociating himself from the rest of the musical:

Praise to the Fords and Rockefellers — Hosannah!
The buyers and the sellers — Hosannah!
All power to the great — Hosannah!
Give them to the city and the state — Hosannah!

From the audience point of view, the night after San Francisco Opera's three-and-a-half-hour Marriage of Figaro with one intermission, Happy End provided relief as a two-and-a-half-hour performance with two breaks. Maybe overtime in the theater is not as costly as in the opera house.