San Francisco Classical Voice

"Just do it!" A familiar motto? Brecht and Weill didn't invent it, of course. Nike's ad agency did. But Michael Feingold borrows it to ironically playful effect in his translation of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, the full-length opera being presented by West Bay Opera of Palo Alto as the company's spirited contribution to the Weill centenary.

Like Feingold, the director of this production, Jonathon Field, takes various measures to update this Weimar Republic parable of all-too-human civilization under the constraints of capitalism. According to Brecht's libretto, there is really only one such constraint. You can "just do it" provided you have enough cash. The first half of the opera narrates the founding of Mahagonny by "fugitives from justice," ending with the inhabitants' brush with nature: a hurricane, which threatens to destroy the city but turns away at the last minute.

The production presents this half fairly straight, but also breathlessly fast, as if in a hurry to get to the business of the second half, in which Brecht and Weill parse the meaning of "it" with a series of set pieces in the manner of a cabaret revue: eating (oneself to death), loving (with cash as aphrodisiac), boxing (below the belt and to the death), drinking (to excess). Such are the activities in which the inhabitants of the "pleasure city" Mahagonny are free to indulge, as are we! But when the lumberjack Jimmy McIntyre -the work's heroic tenor, sung with defiant swagger by Jay Fraley-- can't cover the check, he is sentenced to death in Mahagonny's kangaroo court.

It is at this point in the West Bay production that local "relevance" intrudes with a vengeance: Disney characters and even Ronald MacDonald appear in the protest March at the end, as if to suggest similarly corrupt origins for our own capitalist society. It's a witty gag, in keeping with the spirit of a revue. So is the idea of having Jimmy and his prostitute companion Jenny each sing one of their arias wearing dark glasses and holding a fake microphone à la Elvis.

The small stage of the Lucie Stern Theater in Palo Alto is kept cluttered and busy throughout, with some delightful fluorescent billboards from set designer Peter Crompton. Costume designer Callie Floor seems to have expended most of her creative energies on peripheral matters: dancing typhoon bodies full of cash and dice, with Magritte-style bowlers and Chaplinesque canes, and a Stars-and-Stripes outfit for the sleazy conferencier, Ray Renati, who speaks the narrative captions.

Brecht originally intended these to be projected onto screens for epic effect. Here the screens either side of the stage are used for the sung texts--in the event redundantly, because all the singers projected the English translation with ease in this tiny theater. Perhaps too well, because the orchestra played from behind the stage, and was difficult to hear, particularly the strings.

Although David Sloss's consistently brisk tempi got us through the piece in about two-and-a-half hours, they also robbed Weill's score of some critical detail. As the city rises and later falls, the inhabitants of Mahagonny expressively bemoan their lot (with Italianate ornaments) against a tarantella ostinato. But Sloss's breathless beat meant that the expressivity of the vocal line and the deadly dance rhythm all but disappeared, as did the unresolved tension between melody and accompaniment.

Presumably playing up the satirical and farcical cabaret character of the piece informed the omission of Jenny and Jimmy's love duet, a masterpiece of neo-baroque linear counterpoint, added by Weill late in the process of composition in 1929. Its absence deprives the audience of any connection between nature and civilization, otherwise starkly opposed by fugal hurricanes, on the one hand, and jazzy song style standing for all-too-human depravity, on the other. For a brief moment, in a lyrical enclave, Jenny and Jim's love can find reconciliation coded by a musical style of timeless order. This production would have none of that. This was a quick and dirty "Mahagonny," offset only by the affecting diffidence that Jenny (Jane Hammett) brought to her amatory interactions with Jimmy.

Outstanding was Clifton Romig's "Alaska-Wolf" Joe, a rich bass who struck some aptly melodramatic "gestic" poses. What Jay Fraley as Jimmy lacked in expressive nuance in this most taxing of tenor roles, he made up for with panache and intensity (even though he eschewed the un-Brechtian high C in the big aria in act 2). And the near sell-out audience was clearly appreciative of an opportunity to see this rarely performed "epic opera." Perhaps a larger house not too far from here will now heed the motto: just do it!

(Stephen Hinton is chairman of the Department of Music at Stanford University.)

©2000 Stephen Hinton, all rights reserved