"Into the River Thames’s greenish water/People are all of a sudden plopping down/Could it be plague? Could it be cholera?/Nah, it just means McHeath is back in town." And though Mackie may not be a sight for sore eyes, Alvin Epstein (of the American Repertory Theatre) and Beth Anne Cole are as they reprise their Songs Degenerate and Otherwise from a brief run last summer at Harvard Square’s Market Theater. They’ve added two tunes by Hanns Eisler and one by Olaf Bienert (this with lyrics by Kurt Tucholsky); otherwise, it’s the same music-by-Kurt-Weill/lyrics-mostly-by-Bertolt-Brecht program.
But Cole has only to click her red pumps together to conjure Mackie, Jenny, Peter Stuyvesant, and the rest of Weill’s fun-loving crew. The program embraces both the musicals Weill wrote with Brecht (The Threepenny Opera, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Happy End) before he left Germany (that’s the "degenerate" part) and his Broadway collaborations with a variety of lyricists (Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark, Street Scene — the "otherwise"). And what the juxtaposition points up is that Weill was hardly less "degenerate" on Broadway than he had been in Berlin. Brecht’s lyrics reduce life to sex, money, and death; the happy time has all gone by, the moon won’t stay forever, the life that we lead is not a long one. Yet there’s not much more redemption in Maxwell Anderson’s "September Song" or Ogden Nash’s "I love you more than a wasp can sting" and "Everything ends too soon" — and underneath Weill keeps vamping away, denying comfort or closure. Like film director Fritz Lang (a fellow Nazi refugee), he learned to clothe his subversive æsthetic in America’s naive optimism.
There’s no lack of "degeneracy" in this production. Epstein is as polymorphously perverse as your wildest dreams, and Cole’s not far behind, when they go looking for "pretty boys" in "Alabama Song" (from Mahagonny). Cole is without illusions in "Nana’s Song" ("When I took myself to market . . . ) and Threepenny’s "Barbara Song" ("Stay perpendicular"). The fantasy of Threepenny’s "Pirate Jenny" is a patent pipe dream, and when for her next number she swings into Ira Gershwin’s "My Ship" (from Lady in the Dark), it seems Jenny’s "ship with eight sails and 50 cannons" has returned. In between Epstein sings "Mack the Knife" in both English and (excellent) German, dripping sarcasm in the verse about the "underaged widow" and then showing his own "pearly teeth" with a relish that would give even a shark pause. When in Threepenny’s "Tango Ballad" he and Cole dance with their hands on each other’s butts, they supply the visual equivalent to the verbal dialectic in the Brecht/Eisler "Supply and Demand": "God only knows what a man is/I only know his price." The Market price for this performance is $35; my guess is Brecht and Weill would call that a good deal.
Songs Degenerate and Otherwise runs through this Sunday, April 14; see "Play by Play," on page 11.)
