You can see it from Sting's point of view. Here you are, one of the world's top rock musicians. You've gotten some pretty good notices as an actor in a number of serious films like David Hare's Plenty, playing opposite the reigning queen of serious actresses, Meryl Streep. You care about really serious causes like Amnesty International, the Brazilian rain forests, and the mistreatment of the native Indians there.
So when an eminently serious movie producer comes along with eminently correct artistic and political credentials (Midnight Cowboy, Coming Home, The Mosquito Coast) and suggests you star in a stage production of Bertolt Brecht's best-known work, The Threepenny Opera, with music by Kurt Weill, you go for it.
As did the entire East coast press. Sting as Mack the Knife was featured on the cover of New York Magazine and the special supplement of the New York Times headlining the new fall season's most promising goodies. Sting in The Threepenny Opera certainly looked like the hottest ticket in town. Under the direction of John Dexter, fresh from the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, M. Butterfly, The Threepenny Opera opened out of town at Washington, D.C.'s National Theatre in September. The reviews of the local press were, well, less than enthusiastic.
And one can see why, even without comparing the production to any others, let alone reading Brecht's own notes on the original Die Dreigroschenoper created sixty years ago. In a worthy enough stand against the current practice of milking musical productions, Sting opted for the first week or so to sing without benefit of electronic support. The rest of the cast followed suit. The lyrics, alas, were only intermittently intelligible throughout. (After the reviews, mikes went onto the actors.) Given the new translation of the play by Michael Feingold, drama critic of the Village Voice, in which "happy" was rhymed with "crappy," perhaps this was not such a loss. The crisp, exciting score of Kurt Weill sounded like elevator Muzak.
Where the production suffered the most, however, was in its attempt to recall the theater of Brecht. The German playwright had some strong and, for the period, quite original ideas of how this particular work should be presented. In time he was to expound these theories in productions of his postwar plays like Mother Courage and Her Children and The Caucasian Chalk Circle by the Berliner Ensemble, the acting troupe headed by his wife Helena Weigel in East Berlin.
A Marxist, Brecht conceived of using a new form of theater to subvert or convert conventional audiences. As a means of raising the awareness of his audiences to an exposition of his political thinking, he introduced what he termed a literarization of the theater. This was accomplished by suspending boards over the stage on which the titles of the scenes would be projected.
Brecht wanted an audience to see a play on several levels. To this end, he proposed an epic style; the spectator reading the boards would be, according to Brecht, in the position of a man smoking, emotionally disengaged from what is happening on stage. His ideal spectator would not be caught up by an actor's performance but would be viewing it critically. He would become, in Brecht's words, "an expert." The actor, thereby deprived of his usual means of appealing to an audience, would supposedly be forced to win over
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