{"id":2684,"date":"2025-03-28T17:09:52","date_gmt":"2025-03-28T17:09:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/03\/28\/observer-interviews-theater-and-opera-director-barrie-kosky\/"},"modified":"2025-03-28T17:09:53","modified_gmt":"2025-03-28T17:09:53","slug":"observer-interviews-theater-and-opera-director-barrie-kosky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/03\/28\/observer-interviews-theater-and-opera-director-barrie-kosky\/","title":{"rendered":"Observer Interviews: Theater and Opera Director Barrie Kosky"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Kosky\u2019s revival of The Threepenny Opera<\/em> reclaims Brecht and Weill\u2019s satire for an era that feels just as corrupt as the one that inspired the original. Photo by J\u00f6rg Carstensen\/picture alliance via Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Problematic but a classic, The Threepenny Opera <\/i>was trouble from the time of its premiere at Theater am Schiffbauerdamm back in 1928. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the most famous disasters of all time,\u201d director Barrie Kosky<\/a> tells Observer. \u201cHalf of the set fell down about half an hour before the show. The audience didn\u2019t understand it; they didn\u2019t really like it. Everyone thought it was going to be the biggest flop of all time.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Kosky, considered the finest opera director of his generation, is bringing his 2021 Berliner Ensemble production to St. Ann\u2019s Warehouse, courtesy of BAM<\/a>, for four nights (April 3 through 6), marking his New York City premiere. The well-reviewed production centers on the scabrous Mackie Messer, the infamous thief and cutthroat and the subject of the tune Mack the Knife,<\/i> made famous by Bobby Darin<\/a> and Frank Sinatra<\/a> in the 1950s.<\/p>\n

Based on Beggar\u2019s Opera<\/i>, John Gay<\/a>\u2019s 18th-century play, The Threepenny Opera<\/i> represents the second collaboration between left-wing avant-garde poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht<\/a> and the classically-trained composer Kurt Weill<\/a>. When a 1920s production of John Gay\u2019s play was selling out houses in London, Brecht\u2019s lover and translator, Elisabeth Hauptmann<\/a>, suggested the material for adaptation. Set in the back alleys of London, the narrative focuses on Mackie, who seduces and marries Polly Peachum, daughter to the King of the Beggars. When the latter finds out who his new son-in-law is, he appeals to police inspector Tiger Brown who, despite being an old army buddy of Mackie\u2019s, is persuaded to issue a warrant for his arrest. Mackie takes it on the lam, leaving Polly to lead the gang, which she does with preternatural abilities.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s cynical, satirical, these people are charming monsters,\u201d laughs Kosky. \u201cLate twenties Berlin was a place where you could only be cynical. But despite the play\u2019s nihilism and cynicism, it\u2019s saved by Brecht\u2019s humor and Weill\u2019s music which make it human.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Kosky\u2019s staging embraces artifice, allowing actors to break the fourth wall and the audience to see the wires. Photo: MORITZ HAASE<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Since corruption, greed and narcissism never go out of style, the show remains relevant in any era. \u201cThe triumph of terrible people is timeless. They all get off in the end. Even Mackie\u2014he\u2019s sentenced to death, and there\u2019s the deus ex machina when the noose is around his neck. Now a horseman comes on and tells him the Queen has pardoned him, and he lives on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kosky\u2019s approach to the material was to prohibit anything that smacked of Weimar Republic Germany or the Kander and Ebb musical, Cabaret<\/i>. Brecht who, until then, played mainly to marginal audiences, pulled the material in the direction of social justice. And Weill, steeped in the language of Bach and his own heritage as the son of a Cantor, emphasized emotional desolation.<\/p>\n

\u201cFirstly, Brecht and Weill were experimenting with theatrical and musical language. There hadn\u2019t been a piece quite like this before. That range between what the text is doing and what the music is doing is what makes it so fantastic. Finding a way in which you can do this tango between the intellectually cerebral satirical sarcasm of Brecht\u2019s text with the beautiful, often melancholic yearning of Kurt Weill\u2019s music,\u201d says Kosky of the production\u2019s main challenge.<\/p>\n

Weill\u2019s musical language is influenced by synagogue chants combined with the rhythm of the 20th-century metropolis\u2014a mix of the ancient and the new\u2014with some of Weill\u2019s hero J.S. Bach thrown in for good measure. \u201cHe created a musical style that was unique and revolutionary because he believed in incorporating not just jazz but other instruments and folk music into his music. He transformed it into something new.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not only the music that makes The Threepenny Opera<\/i> revolutionary. It\u2019s the ultra-modern notion (for the time) of a show drawing attention to the fact that it\u2019s a show. \u201cEven though the actors are speaking dialog, it must be done in a way that is always alerting the audience to the playing of the make-believe, to the artifice.\u201d<\/p>\n

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This production resists period clich\u00e9, emphasizing the timeless grotesquery of charming monsters and systems that reward them. Photo: MORITZ HAASE<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kosky reminded his cast that they could break the fourth wall at any time, comparing the approach to vaudeville. \u201cThe challenge is to keep it light. I was constantly saying to the actors, \u2018Speak it like a character from a Lubitsch film, fast and clever. Don\u2019t overlay all of this with meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Weill first set Brecht\u2019s lyrics to music for the song cycle Mahagonny<\/i>, written for the Festival of German Music, a then-annual event held at Baden-Baden. Months later, Brecht approached him to write a score for what would become The Threepenny Opera<\/i>. While developing the script, Brecht retreated to a villa in south France along with Weill and his wife Lotte Lenya<\/a>, Hauptmann and director Erich Engel<\/a>, but ducked out in July to take care of business in Berlin and didn\u2019t return until eleven days before opening. The show was a smash hit throughout Europe but flopped on Broadway in 1933. It wasn\u2019t until a 1954 revival that it caught on in North America.<\/p>\n

\u201cBrecht and Weill, they weren\u2019t friends, they got on at this stage pretty well, but a few years later, they weren\u2019t working with each other,\u201d says Kosky, who produced the show at the theater in which it premiered in 1928. \u201cIt was very special to be rehearsing Threepenny Opera<\/i> in the theater where Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, et al., worked. And when you work with Berliner Ensemble, there is a desk, his original desk from when he started the Berliner Ensemble after the war,\u201d says Kosky about working from Brecht\u2019s desk, which he confesses to carving his initials in.<\/p>\n

Originally from Melbourne, Australia, Kosky showed a proclivity for music early on, playing piano before he was five years old and adding the cello by the time he was six. Describing himself as \u201can obsessed theater kid,\u201d he sang in the chorus and acted in school plays, though his main mentor was his Hungarian grandmother, who took him to his first opera, and his parents, who exposed him to every type of live entertainment, both classical and contemporary.<\/p>\n

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Nearly a century after its chaotic premiere, The Threepenny Opera<\/em> still exposes the machinery of power, performance and moral collapse. Photo: MORITZ HAASE<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI was a sponge. I wanted to be a concert pianist and wanted to be a conductor. I directed my first show at school at fifteen\u2014Wozzeck<\/i>,\u201d he says, citing Alban Berg<\/a>\u2019s opera about madness and murder. After graduating from Melbourne Grammar School, a private school for boys, he attended the University of Melbourne, where he directed Mozart\u2019s Don Giovanni<\/i> and Frank Wedekind<\/a>\u2019s The Lulu Plays<\/i>, Earth Spirit<\/i> and Pandora\u2019s Box<\/i>.<\/p>\n

After building an illustrious career in theater and opera in his home country, he became co-director of Vienna\u2019s Schauspielhaus Wien and quickly became one of Europe\u2019s most in-demand directors. Named artistic director for the prestigious Komische Oper Berlin in 2012, a position he held for ten years, Kosky went on to win the award for Best Director at the 2014 International Opera Awards.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of my friends apologize for not liking opera. Don\u2019t apologize. No one should be forced to go to the opera,\u201d says Kosky, who is currently prepping Wagner\u2019s Ring Cycle in London. \u201cYou go and see opera because I believe it\u2019s the highest form of European performing arts that we\u2019ve made over hundreds of years. And when it\u2019s good, it\u2019s untouchable,\u201d he pauses, smiling slyly. \u201cAnd when it\u2019s bad, it\u2019s excruciating.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tickets for Kosky\u2019s production of <\/b>The Threepenny Opera<\/i><\/b><\/a> are available via BAM, with shows on April 3-6, 2025.<\/b><\/p>\n

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The show\u2019s enduring punch lies in its ability to mock the powerful while seducing us with their songs. Photo: MORITZ HAASE<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\t\t\t\t\"Barrie<\/p><\/div>\n