Last night Spoleto kicked off in style with Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s insolent masterpiece Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. It was a hot production - hot enough to challenge the Sotille air conditioning system, which was about to melt down near the end of the show. This anti-capitalist piece had the capitalist patrons taking off their dinner jackets and probably bitching about the money they shelled out for the tickets. After all, if you’ve got people on stage telling you you suck, it would at least be nice to have it done in cool comfort. But our capitalist audience took the abuse with pleasant good charm, as is often the case with Spoleto audiences. Besides how can you not respect Kurt and Bertolt. No one gives sleaze and anarchy such grand style. These are the guys who put the sparkle in Kander and Ebb and probably influenced an entire generation of American theatre. It’s hard to think of any significant musical theatre these two guys didn’t have an impact on. Even Andrew Lloyd Webber, bless his soul, shows his Weill-Brecht stripes in Jesus Christ Superstar, when Pontius Pilate irreverently does that music hall number.
Religion gets short thrift in Mahagonny, with God visiting the city for about three minutes before he’s booed and booted out. But in the end the citizens of Mahagonny are not happy at all with what they have wrought. They’ve created a paradise of consumption which has also consumed them - sound familiar?
Maestro Emmanuel Villaume was in top form musically and personally. Has anybody else noticed how Villaume is almost like a method actor - he takes on the personality of the work he is about to perform in the moments before he goes on. I’ve seen him suave and charming with Mozart, focused and intellectual with Stravinsky and, last night, gregarious, self-assured, and almost bombastic, jumping over seats to greet people in the theatre before the performance - very apropos to the Weill-Brecht mood.
On a recent interview for the festival on public radio, Villaume spoke about how the conductor is a kind of lightning rod for the performers, one who harnesses the energy of the music which exists only theoretically on page and can find true expression only in the moment. That is certainly the philosophy he appears to embody.
That’s not to downplay the musicians, which as, fellow Eargasms blogger Lindsay Koob has pointed out, are first rate and drawn from all around the best sources in the US. Their talents were in plain display right on stage with the actor-singers in Mahagonny. The pianist was my favorite, not because I dabble in pianism myself, but because this guy was really great, not just fittingly schmaltzy as the score demanded but also theatrically so - absolutely perfect for the part.
So now that Spoleto is off and running I’m wondering if everything else out there can possibly live up to the level of perfection I saw last night. If past experience is to be trusted, I think it will.
FR
