Bringing Brecht to Broadway

The Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s classic musical that opens this month at the famous Studio 54, is not your ordinary musical. It was adapted from The Beggar’s OperaThe Threepenny Opera written by John Gay in 1728 as a comedic satire about the interaction between the classes. The Threepenny Opera was written by Brecht in 1928, who used it as a focus for his new style of theatre. This style, which would become known as Brechtian theatre, explodes onto the stage in this revival, using modern conceits to fulfill Brecht’s original vision of the play. Lighting designer Jason Lyons completely captures the style and complexity of the piece as he brings his own touch to this classic work.

In order to understand the show, it is necessary first to understand how Brecht affected the theatre. He created an influential theory of stagecraft, which he called “the epic theatre,” wherein a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the action before him or her, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the actions on the stage. He believed that the experience of a climactic catharsis left an audience complacent. Instead, he wanted his audiences to use this critical perspective to identify social ills at work in the world and be moved to go forth from the theatre and effect change. He employed techniques that reminded the spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself, which he called the Verfremdungseffekt, or “alienation effect.” Such techniques included actors addressing the audience directly, transposition of text to third person or past tense, speaking the stage direction out loud, lighting the stage in exaggerated or unnatural ways, the use of song and explanatory placards. By highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to communicate that the audience’s reality was, in fact, a construction and, as such, changeable.

As Lyons points out, “It is an extremely Brechtian piece, and the one thing that people always forget about Brecht is that he continued evolving and continued working on things throughout his life—this show being one of those things—and that he wanted to continue to make it into a more modern idea. A lot of the design ideas started from thinking about that and…what ideals he would try to infuse in it.” With this in mind, the design team created a fully Brechtian world from the very top of the show.

As audience members walk in, they are immediately thrust into the world of the theatre by experiencing the houselights, a series of PAR 64s focused at the house, at full. “The house lights were cued at full to help highlight the difference between the audience and the stage,” notes Lyons. “We also haze the house a bit before opening the doors to give it an odd open glow to show those lights even more.” As the house lights go out, the cast members walk on stage through the orchestra to the two racks of costumes waiting for them on stage. Behind the racks, there is a truss of Studio Beams, which is flown in from the grid. As the actors put on their makeup, another Brechtian technique, the lights on the truss fade up and start to fan out into the audience as the truss slowly moves out.

“The opening sequence came from the idea of changing perspective of what the audience is used to seeing,” says Lyons. “The idea of the cast putting on makeup and putting on their costumes is a very Brechtian device, but also, the idea that the footlights are coming from upstage, you’re about to see what it is like for them on the other side of the footlights. Also, we use it as a tool to help the entrance of the neon signs, which helps make that more interesting.”

Those neon signs, which are all flown in together to open the show, are the literal words that describe the locations throughout the show. For each location, a different sign flies in to indicate where the characters are supposed to be. The stage is predominately left bare, with few pieces of scenery and several traveling squares that carry characters on and off stage in a surreal way, floating into the scene. In addition to the neon, there is a red LED display screen which flashes the names of each scene before they’re played out. As Lyons describes it, “Much of the staging and design was based around the neon signs. We wanted to use both the neon signs and the LED sign to literally set up the scene and put us in those places. From there, it was about forming a composition that would make sense for the scene. We have this big open space and all these neon signs, so it was about figuring out how to carve out the space interestingly and compositionally with the signs, but also so that it would make sense to what that space was supposed to be.

“As we were talking about what the whole world of the show would be like, a lot of it was about pulling from the colors within the neon signs. As our conversations grew, we decided that it wasn’t a specific time period and was more about a specific society and a group of people within that society. I talked with designer Isaac Mizrahi about the costumes and his concept of it being a very Edward Gorey world. This also led us in the direction of using a lot of tints you don’t usually see on people in the theatre. We use a lot of pale acidic green on people, which I wouldn’t normally do, but in this world, it seemed to fit really well. We also use a lot of the colder arc source lamps in the same way, to make the people a bit over exposed as part of that idea.” One of the most interesting parts of the show’s look is the juxtaposition of color and highlighting of the actors in unusual and non-traditional ways, capturing the effect of alienation.

Instead of surrounding the stage with traditional black velour curtains to mute the offstage areas, this production intends to highlight the stage to further demonstrate that this is a show and not a reality-based play. “We wanted to pop these peoples’ lives out of the over-the-top surround, in terms of the lush red drapes. The curtains that surround the stage on all sides are actually burgundy crushed velvet. They take light just amazingly. They allowed me to change the entire surround with just a slight change of color extremely successfully,” Lyons explains.

The story of the show essentially follows the criminal MacHeath (Mack the Knife, played by Alan Cumming). The story begins with his marriage to Polly Peachum (Nellie McKay), daughter of the well-to-do Mr. Peachum (Jim Dale), who runs the beggars of London. Mr. Peachum attempts to hang Mac, thus ending the union with his daughter. The interplay between the classes becomes the focus of Brecht’s work, eventually— and literally—asking the question, “Who is the bigger criminal: he who robs a bank, or he who founds one?” As Mac is pursued, he eventually finds himself in jail, which becomes the setting for the song “The Ballad of the Happy Life.”

Lyons describes the setting: “I created boxes on the stage as part of the composition of the world that they were in. In ‘The Ballad of the Happy Life,’ Mac is in prison and we slide the jail above him and do a vaudeville number. We wanted to create something that literally broke him out of prison for that moment, and pushed the walls of his frustration out, and still make it visually interesting. We used a lot of shadow play where you can still see the bars of the cell on the floor from above, but he had to be able to move all around the stage and interact with the other actors.”

After an escape and recapture, Mac finds himself in yet another prison, this one intended to keep him locked up until his execution. Lyons points out, “The initial intent of the final sequence was the idea of a modern incarceration, literal ‘laser lines,’ surrounding this death cell that he’s put in—something more modern than his first jail. As the sequence goes on, it creates this tangled web, to be taken literally. He’s been caught in a tangled web of lies and deceit, and then the final idea is that it collapses all around him.” These laser lines are created with Vari*Lite VL 3000s using Lazer line templates and a tight iris to reduce flare, which create several very sharp bright lines of light.

In creating a Brechtian world, Lyons is able to cast aside many of the conventions of traditional musical theatre. “It was a great opportunity to push all of those ideas that we usually shy away from, and it kind of opens your mind to the different ways you can do things when you’re not trying to be subtle and tricky about it. There are a few times when we’ve asked the spot ops to be a little bit sloppy with their color shifts and iris shifts because it’s something that should have a patina to it; it should be a bit sloppy. The audience should know it’s a person up there running it, not a computer controlled moving light,” he adds.

Jason Lyons has made a bold debut with his first Broadway musical, in addition to his first Broadway design earlier this year with Barefoot in the Park. As this show was intended, it recaptures the soul of Brecht’s work from the 1920s and brings it new life. with new technology and design aesthetics.