\n<\/p>\n
When \u201cThe Threepenny Opera\u201d returns to New York this spring, for an all-too-brief visit<\/a> to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it will be notable for a few reasons.<\/p>\n For one, it will be a homecoming. Although \u201cThreepenny\u201d was born in Berlin, an artifact of Weimar-era culture, with music by Kurt Weill and text by Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, it had a midcentury resurgence on the level of a pop-culture phenomenon when it was revived Off Broadway in 1954<\/a>.<\/p>\n And it will be performed by the Berliner Ensemble, which was founded by Brecht and still operates out of the theater where \u201cThreepenny\u201d had its premiere in 1928. The group is a trustworthy custodian of a work that is often mishandled today, especially in recent<\/a> New York productions<\/a>.<\/p>\n But what is most important about this run of \u201cThreepenny,\u201d presented by BAM and St. Ann\u2019s Warehouse April 3 through 6, is that it will be the first real opportunity for New York audiences to see the work of the director Barrie Kosky.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Though Kosky, 58, graced local playbills once before, when his production of \u201cThe Magic Flute,\u201d a collaboration with the company 1927, came to the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2019<\/a>, \u201cThreepenny\u201d will be the first show that is purely his own. Which should come as a shock, since Kosky is one of the busiest and most brilliant, not to mention entertaining, directors working in Europe today.<\/p>\n He is a director accomplished in theater and<\/em> opera. His work could fit easily on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera, with a balance of intelligence and showmanship that would breathe new life into both. This \u201cThreepenny\u201d will be an opportunity for him to win over New York audiences. Will impresarios be watching?<\/p>\n Born in Australia, Kosky has described himself as a \u201cgay, Jewish kangaroo.\u201d His grandparents were European transplants who came from Budapest and the shtetls of Belarus. His grandmother from Hungary instilled in him a love of operetta, he wrote in his book \u201c\u2018Und Vorhang auf, Hallo!,\u2019<\/a>\u201d or \u201c\u2018And Curtain Up, Hello!\u2019\u201d He ended up developing a passion for classical music, operas and musicals without much regard for genre or hierarchy.<\/p>\n To him, \u201cThe Magic Flute\u201d was the \u201cmother ship of the musical.\u201d Mahler\u2019s symphonies were art, and so was \u201cThe Simpsons.\u201d As he grew up, and began to perform in and then direct theater, his artistry was informed, he likes to say, by two other cultural artifacts: Kafka\u2019s writing and \u201cThe Muppets.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n They weren\u2019t so different, at least in his mind. Several Kafka stories are about talking animals, and there is something Kafkaesque in Kermit\u2019s never-ending struggle to keep his show going. Both, Kosky wrote in his memoir, are reminiscent of Yiddish theater; Fozzie Bear is even a kind of sad Jewish clown. He thought of \u201cThe Muppets\u201d as \u201ca queer space\u201d in which Miss Piggy was the reigning drag queen, flirting with Rudolf Nureyev in a steam room and tormenting Kermit, a gay \u201cMax Reinhardt meets Charlie Chaplin.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s sensational for Kosky to say that his aesthetic is Kafka and \u201cThe Muppets,\u201d but if you watch his productions with that in mind, it\u2019s accurate. There is hardly a trace of realism in his shows, which tend to unfold throughout dreamscapes. A room may not have a wall; comedy may become irrationally nightmarish; life may just be an endless vaudeville.<\/p>\n Kosky\u2019s career bloomed in Australia before flourishing in Europe, with tenures running the Schauspielhaus in Vienna and the Komische Oper in Berlin. (He has also had champions in the United States. The Met had planned to import his production of Prokofiev\u2019s \u201cThe Fiery Angel\u201d in 2020. It was canceled because of the pandemic, with no rescheduling in sight. Upstate, however, he is developing a new work with the Fisher Center at Bard.) Throughout his projects you sense someone, like Kermit, determined to put on a good show. That is why even his weaker productions still function well as theater.<\/p>\n If anything, that is the thread through his stagings. Some are maximalist and some are minimalist, but all are theatrical, which isn\u2019t always the case with his peers in Europe. And while there are visual hallmarks to a Kosky show, like bold colors, his work is more recognizable for its sensibility: Audience members can count on virtually airtight logic, no matter how zany his work may appear, and they can expect performers to behave with the organic freedom that comes from thorough, detail-obsessed rehearsals.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Like the best of directors, Kosky also knows that different titles call for different looks and dramatic gestures. In his book he describes \u201cTosca\u201d as an opera that calls for \u201cthick oil paint and a broad brush,\u201d whereas something by Mozart or Janacek requires \u201ca fine brush.\u201d One of the broadest canvases in the repertoire is Wagner\u2019s \u201cDie Meistersinger von N\u00fcrnberg,\u201d which Kosky staged at the Bayreuth Festival in 2017<\/a>. The production encapsulated his bravery, wit and charm.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMeistersinger\u201d contains over four and a half hours of music, with pitfalls throughout: comedy, romance, antisemitic tropes and, in the final minutes, a darkly nationalistic turn. Even more difficult is staging it at Bayreuth, which was founded by Wagner and comes with the baggage of complicated history, not least as a favorite opera destination of Hitler\u2019s.<\/p>\n Kosky addressed all that head-on. He set the first act inside a replica of Wahnfried, Wagner\u2019s home, where the composer was known to play and sing through his opera scores. Kosky recreated one of those gatherings, with \u201cMeistersinger\u201d characters represented by real, historical people like Cosima Wagner and her father, Franz Liszt. He even included Wagner\u2019s Newfoundland dogs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n At first, the set design was unusually realistic for Kosky. But at the end of Act One, the walls were pulled up to reveal the comparatively chilly courtroom interior of the Nuremberg trials. In Wagner\u2019s libretto, the second act closes with a comedic riot sparked by a misunderstanding and an attack on the character Beckmesser, a pedantic villain coded as a kind of Jewish outsider. There was humor in Kosky\u2019s staging, but it was replaced by horror at what suddenly started to look like a pogrom.<\/p>\n It felt as if everyone in the theater was holding their breath as an enormous antisemitic caricature based on \u201cThe Eternal Jew\u201d<\/a> inflated onstage like a Macy\u2019s Thanksgiving Day Parade float. As it deflated and the curtain closed, the audience was left with a provocation for the hourlong intermission that followed.<\/p>\n For the nationalistic ending, Kosky had the character Hans Sachs deliver his monologue about \u201choly German art\u201d as if testifying at Nuremberg, shaking his fists with conviction as the courtroom emptied and he was left alone while a Fellini-esque orchestra in black tie rolled onstage to play the jubilant finale. Was it delusion or triumph? The audience was left to decide, a stand-in for the jury.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Like the opera, Kosky\u2019s staging was hardly simple. But it was clear, funny yet terrifying, delightful and then haunting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He has achieved similar effects with starker images. In his production of Janacek\u2019s \u201cKat\u2019a Kabanova\u201d at the Salzburg Festival in 2022<\/a>, the opera\u2019s tragedy unfolded both on a bare stage and before hundreds of mannequins with their backs turned on the action. The action of his \u201cFiddler on the Roof,\u201d which originated at the Komische Oper but has traveled to Lyric Opera of Chicago<\/a>, springs from a stack of wardrobes and wooden furniture.<\/p>\n \u201cFiddler\u201d is far from the only musical that Kosky has staged at the Komische Oper, a one-stop shop in Berlin for opera, operetta and musical theater. During his time there, which ended in 2022 with a delirious, three-hour show called \u201cBarrie Kosky\u2019s All-Singing, All-Dancing Yiddish Revue,\u201d<\/a> he revolutionized the company\u2019s repertoire and unearthed operettas by composers like Paul Abraham, Oscar Straus and Emmerich Kalman.<\/p>\n Kosky continues to direct at the Komische Oper, and he is midway through a plan to stage five musicals there. He began with \u201cLa Cage aux Folles,\u201d<\/a> in a gayer, grander treatment than it ever got on Broadway, and continued with \u201cChicago,\u201d<\/a> free of Fosse clich\u00e9s and heavy on razzle-dazzle. Last fall he directed \u201cSweeney Todd,\u201d which at first appeared to take place in a Victorian toy theater before unfolding against images of urban decay, including in Thatcher-era London. All these were better than their most recent counterparts in New York.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Directing \u201cThreepenny,\u201d at the storied Berliner Ensemble in 2021<\/a>, had similar pressures to the \u201cMeistersinger\u201d job at Bayreuth. He was replacing the chilly, unmusical production by Robert Wilson<\/a>, and \u201cThreepenny,\u201d a beloved but imperfect work, is difficult. Too often, modern productions are bogged down by humorlessness and affected sleaze, as if it were \u201cCabaret.\u201d<\/p>\n But \u201cThreepenny\u201d is filthily hilarious and dangerously entertaining, daring audiences to be seduced by Weill\u2019s earworm melodies before stinging them with the barbs of Brecht and Hauptmann\u2019s script. Kosky, more than most directors, is sensitive to its polyphonic structure in his staging, which moves around, repeats and trims material throughout to make the show move briskly and with a light hand, allowing the subtext its slithering grace.<\/p>\n For people who were brought up on Brecht as a purveyor of deliberatively blunt theater, Kosky\u2019s approach may seem sacrilegious. But in its affability, its showmanship, his \u201cThreepenny\u201d works the unsettling magic it should. It\u2019s not until the lights come up, and you begin to relax your smile, that you realize you were just cheering for a narcissistic murderer by the name of Mack the Knife.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n