Mahagonny Songspiel

Charlie       Bjorn Arvidsson
Billy         Brian Galliford
Jessie        Inez Carsauw
Bessie        Beatrijs Desmet
Jimmy         Robin Greenway
Bobby         Wilfried Van den Brande

Happy End

Lilian        Susannah Self
Lady in Grey  Beatrijs Desmet
Jane          Inez Carsauw
Bill          Brian Galliford
Sam           Robin Greenway
Hannibal      Wilfried Van den Brande
Chorus        Bjorn Arvidsson

Conductor     Etienne Siebens
Director      Ian Burton

Muziektheater Transparant
Prometheus Ensemble

I really like it when they stage my shower repertoire. We seem to get
precious little Brecht/Weill in London. I may have missed some, but the
last I remember was The threepenny opera in 1974 and a Proms Happy End in
1975. There's plenty of Brecht and Weill separately, strangely.

This pair of Songspiele was entertainingly done by the Flemish company
Musiektheater Transparent, with some good singing performances and a band
that played rather too relentlessly loud and solidly.

Mahagonny was staged as a fantasy acted out by a group of workers on an
antiseptic industrial site. I'm not sure whether this was Brecht and
Weill's concept or the director Ian Burton's. The workers dream of escape
to the Utopian city of Mahagonny, in America, where all desires will be
fulfilled, then find that it is an illusion and dream of escape from there
before returning to work. The great character songs (Verdenke, dich, Herr
Jacob Schmidt, and Denn wie man sich bettet) are missing, leaving the
dialectic between desire and reality, the Alabama-Song and the
Benares-Song, to be acted out rather tediously, even though it takes only
half an hour. Still, they're good enough songs, and the performances were
enjoyable, especially Beatrijs Desmet's seriously desperate contribution to
the Alabama-Song.

Happy End is pretty funny, a precursor of Guys and Dolls in which a mission
doll tries to covert a gang of criminals, falls in love with their leader
Billy Cracker, and so disrupts a heist on Christmas Eve. In the end, the
criminals and the Sally Army join forces to "save the souls" of capitalists
("What is the robbery of one bank compared to the robbery committed by the
bank itself?", cheers from unreconstructed members of the audience), and,
in this production, the lovers are massacred.

The production concertinaed the songs together with a minimum of linking
dialogue, and singers playing several roles,  with mildly surreal results.
The female Salvation Army general and some of the soldiers were played by
men, and some of the gangsters by women. The end of Subaray-Jonnya,
torchily sung by Susannah Self as Hallelujah Lilian, was interrupted by
machine-gun carrying criminals dressed as Santa Claus.

Lilian's numbers all occur together, as do the Salvation Army hymns, making
for some monotone sequences, though they're all good songs. In this staging
most of the songs remained numbers, performed by the characters within the
action. Again I'm not sure whether this reflects the original play or the
director's adaptation. The result, however, was less abstract than in the
Mahagonny staging, partly because the characters were well defined and
partly because of the humour of the concept.

Susannah Self was not an evangelist to tangle with -- as much Brunnhilde as
Sister Sarah Brown-- , and Beatrijs Desmet as the criminal mastermind and
police spy's ex was throaty and sinister-weird. Brian Galliford as Bill
sang a splendid Bilbao song, but reminded me more of a cowboy than a
gangster.

Altogether a very jolly evening. The ideological content seems like a joke
now, but Brecht had a great sense of the absurd and Weill's music still
can't be beaten.