"Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny," the Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht masterpiece of urban outrage and revolutionary 1931 hybridization of opera and musical theater, was given by Los Angeles Opera seemingly the right ingredients to make it rise Saturday night.
John Doyle, whose recent virtuosic productions of Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd" and "Company" have proven unusually fresh and direct for Broadway, directed. Audra McDonald, who builds a bridge (to steal a line from her latest Nonesuch album) between Broadway and the lyric stage better than anyone of her generation, has the makings of being the most seriously seductive Jenny since Teresa Stratas.
Patti LuPone, another Broadway star, may not have been born to sing the cynical Madam Begbick, but she is unquestionably a great choice to play her. James Conlon, the company's new music director, has a special affinity for the composers and artists the Nazis didn't like. This dangerously abrasive and black-humored study in decadence and mob mentality adamantly pushed all the Nazis' buttons.
Naturally, curiosity over the production has been high and widespread. Hollywood stars and New York managers stood out at Saturday's premiere. Yet despite the production's many first-rate performances -- including a brilliant one by tenor Anthony Dean Griffey as the chump, Jimmy -- "Mahagonny" doesn't rise on the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stage. It falls.
The work is strong social satire and even stronger social medicine. There were in the 1930s no operatic models for it. Brecht and Weill had already broken new theatrical ground with "The Threepenny Opera," but "Mahagonny," while including many elements of popular musical theater, is more operatic. Weill takes what he needs musically from wherever he feels appropriate; Bach and the cabaret are equally useful for conveying the depths of the human condition and those to which we can sink.
Begbick, Trinity Moses and Fatty the Bookkeeper, fugitives from justice, build a city when their car breaks down in forsaken Midwest America. They start with a brothel and let the rest naturally flow from there. Workers from Alaska find their way. Jimmy is one.
The laws are of the jungle. Sins grease the economy. Money is manna. Jimmy's greatest crime is not falling in love with the prostitute Jenny but rather not having the money to pay his booze bill. For that, he must die.
