Director Omri Nitzan, choreographer Javier de Frutos, lighting designer Avi Yona Bueno (Bambi ) and video designer Shai Bonder are continuing on the Israeli Opera stage the journey to the Weimar Republic they began with the production of "Cabaret" by John Kander, Fred Ebb, John van Druten and Christopher Isherwood at the Cameri Theater - which is located under the same roof. Joining the Cameri team this time are conductor David Stern, set designer Michael Kremenko and costume designer Magali Gerberon for Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny."
Though the two productions share a common background and many elements of theatrical brilliance, they are in fact two entirely different aesthetic and ideological worlds. The plot of "Cabaret" takes place with the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, when the stories that form its core were written. But the play, the musical and the music were written about 30 years later for an audience that already knew how the story ended. And perhaps even more important: "Cabaret" is a musical, a theater piece packaged as entertainment (which doesn't rule out a message, even a sharp one ). This enables changes, adjustments, additions and cuts that can yield different emphases in every production. Moreover, the message here is clear. The audience knows the historical outcome (though the characters do not ) and the statement, no matter how you camouflage it, is always true and is certainly true for our times: For evil to triumph, all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing. And the audience always consists only of good people.
An imaginary city
"Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny" was written in real time, during the brief lifespan of the Weimar Republic, at the end of the 1920s. But it is definitely not set then and there. Brecht and Weill transport their testimony to the imaginary city of Mahagonny, which is American in its cultural nature (in the characters' names and place names like Alaska, for example ) and spin a clear allegory about a society in a certain cultural situation and the fate that will befall it. The original audience did not know the end of the story. It was living inside the plot.
But even more importantly, two years before "Mahagonny" Brecht and Weill scored a great success with "The Threepenny Opera," which to a large extent deals with the very same materials and characters. They produced "The Threepenny Opera" as theater and since then, though it is an opera it has been presented as theater, whether repertory or commercial, with the sheen of entertainment and the freedom to bend the musical and dramatic materials to the director's theatrical vision.
The story of "Mahagonny," too, was originally written as a series of songs, with the subtitle "The Little Mahagonny," and only later did it evolveinto a full-scale opera. Relative to the theater, including the musical-entertainment theater, opera is a whole different playing field. Here the music is king. The music determines what happens and the text is very hard to edit in accordance with the needs of the production. Here it is impossible to cut half a line, skip two phrases or dig a trench between two sentences that delay the theatrical momentum after you have cut out the third sentence that separates them. Of course you can leave out an entire aria or musical interlude but this will almost certainly arouse the antagonism of the keepers of the faith in the musical score.
Nearly 80 years ago, at the end of the 1920s, Brecht and Weill set out explicitly to change the world of theater and opera. According to their statements cited in the program, this wasn't opera to which the audience was accustomed. Today, however, though 80 years have gone by and quite a lot of contemporary operas have been written since then, the audience is still accustomed to the opera Brecht and Weill set out to change. Every opera production in our day, at the opera house, is subordinated to the conventions of opera. This is so even if the artistic undertaking by Brecht and Weill is to a large extent anti-dramatic and anti-theatrical.
Thus, for example, the whole first act of the opera, about the building of the sin city in the desert by three escaped criminals with the aim of making money from people, not land, is a long pageant of static situations and symbols. (One of the criminals is called Trinity Moses, the latter, being the definitive Jewish name, with "Trinity" being a clearly Christian reference. ) Though it begins with movement as the three fugitives flee from the police (with the screening of a car-chase filmed from the air, of the sort we see on television and in American films ), we are then stuck in the desert with seven tedious whores (one for each day of the week ) and migrants from the industrial cities. Then there is a financial crisis and a recovery. Why? Because. Because that's the way life is.
Where's the drama?
But this is theater. What's the dramatic action? There isn't any. There is the beauty of music. Any theater or entertainment producer would have cut out the crisis and the recovery and would have left only captions. Then four woodcutters from Alaska appear (The four horsemen of the Apocalypse? ) and something dramatic starts happening. But before the interval we still have a typhoon that looms but doesn't materialize. Brecht and Weill thought of calling the city Sodom and making the typhoon a deluge, but they resisted the temptation. The production does provide us with the screening of a rainbow and a dove with an olive leaf in its beak.
Some of the sung texts sound familiar and relevant to us here, even though they were written in the Weimar Republic. The pleasure city of Mahagonny was built because people lost faith in the systems that existed at the time. And this, of course, is a clear statement about us. A pleasure city in the desert, outside the law? Indeed, here in Israel Eilat was built at the far end of the Arava and in its day prisoners were exiled to it from the center of the country. And the city, incidentally, doesn't fall at the end of the opera, though the ending does not auger well. It is, after all, a place where the only crime is not having money - truly the capitalist era in which we are are living and watching as it crumbles before our very eyes, upon us.
Neon lights
Nitzan and his design team have made the first, static act into a lightshow. Lights appear on huge neon signs above the bar where the whores are sold to the highest bidder; they twinkle at the back when the stock market indices plummet. They create a carpet of lighting that becomes a playing field and parts of it turn off as the economic crisis worsens. Ostensibly, this is a clear example of "transforming opera into a reflection of our times." After all, the show of lights that transmit information and dazzle is reminiscent of Times Square in New York and Piccadilly Circus in London, which in Brecht and Weill's day in Berlin (or Leipzig, where the premiere was held and was not a success ) were not as bright as they are today. The combination of neon signs in Hebrew and English is reminiscent of Tel Aviv today. However, in fact Berlin in the 1920s was the most daring and glittering laboratory for experiments in advertising by means of light, on buildings, on screens and in projections, even in the sky.
Historian Boaz Neumann has dedicated to this a fascinating and instructive chapter in his book "Being-in-the-Weimar-Republic." Thus, in a certain sense this modern production is indeed faithful to the reality of the urban landscape at the time the opera was written.
Relative to the glamorous and to a large extent flat stasis of the first half, the next two acts are far more purposeful. This is the story of Jimmy Mahoney (Wolfgang Schwaninger ) and his three friends Jack, Joe and Bill (Israeli singers Guy Mannheim, Vladimir Braun and Noah Briger ). All of them have worked in Alaska for seven years, like the biblical Jacob toiled in his day, and now they want to buy pleasures with their money.
In this second half of the production, Avi Yona Bueno's lighting is revealed in all its splendor. He not only creates twinkling scenes of plenty, he uses light to sculpt a magical atmosphere (for example in the duet sung by Jim and Jenny and in Jim's aria ).
Here is where the conflict is revealed: After Jack stuffs himself to death, Joe is tempted to enter the boxing ring for a fight he is certain to lose to Trinity Moses. Jim bets on his friend, against the odds and in the name of friendship, and loses all his money. He turns for help to his friend Billy and to Jenny, the whore who was sold to him and who has become his beloved. The two of them disappoint him because, unlike him, they are not prepared to bet their money on friendship. And thus he is taken to court, where though it is possible to buy justice (not social justice, just personal justice ), here too he does not have the means. This part of the opera does not lack for theatrical brilliance and it benefits from the acting and musical abilities of the four lumberjacks from Alaska and from Noemi Nadelmann's stage personality in the role of Jenny. Right after the opera begins she has the honor of singing the opera's hit, "Moon Over Alabama" (in order to write a comparable hit, many composers of musicals would sell their souls or their grandmothers ).
A bleak fate for women
Parenthetically, it should be noted here that women's fate in this opera is bleak in the extreme. The widow Begbick (who will reappear in Brecht's "A Man is a Man" ) is a procuress who sells her working girls to the highest bidders. Jenny gets sold to Jim, but they seemingly develop a kind of affectionate relationship within the corrupt reality of Mahagonny. However, she betrays him and is immediately re-sold to Billy and it is clear from the situation that now her fate will be worse than it was at the brothel where she had worked and maintained a vestige of tattered pride. A final comment on the limitations of theatrical work in opera. Scene 3 of the second act depicts the way love looks in Mahagonny: Six mattresses are laid out on the stage. The six whores in servants' clothing are brought out in a supermarket cart. In the depths of the raked stage is a chorus of men, who are waiting in line to pay for a turn with the girls. An usher urges the girls and their clients to finish quickly, because there is a line.
The spectator in the theater would wait for the six men to finish their hasty couplings - in a variety of poses - and make way for those who come after them in the line. But this does not happen. The line sings and waits and the same six couples keep at it on the mattresses. And then you understand. The six couples are dancers and what they are doing is performing a complex and bluntly stylized choreography of couplings that does not leave much to the imagination. Theatrical logic expects the men to replace one another on the grinding girls but the choreographic convention requires a "signification" that empties the theatrical situation of its power.
"Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny" is quite a complex experience. Much of the work is very impressive and much of the performance by the singer-actors is very enjoyable. The eye is afforded generous compensation and the music is given the respect due to it. However, admirers of Brecht and Weill will forgive me if I allow my self to say that this is not their best work, and were it not for its operatic pedigree with all that implies it would most probably have remained a footnote to the list of their joint and individual masterpieces. In my opinion this production does its utmost to emphasizes the opera's virtues but regrettably it suffers from the flawed material, which interests the mind and the eye all the way through but the heart and the emotions less so.
