![]() ![]() ![]() That was a cleverly conceptual affair with less focus on the nuances of Weill’s musical interpretation.īut Fred Anzevino, the founding artistic director of Theo Ubique, a Weill aficionado of long standing and a refreshing stickler for excellent singing, has put together a fresh and lively take on a tricky, not-for-all-tastes show that, when done well, always reminds you that a whole lot of what theater people now think of as fresh and radical, Brecht was already doing in the 1920s. I last reviewed “Threepenny Opera” in Chicago all the way back in 2008, in a lively production by a now-defunct theater company known as The Hypocrites, under the direction of Sean Graney, at the now-defunct Steppenwolf Garage. These days, though, you rarely see a decent Chicago “Threepenny,” which is technically quite difficult to sing. ![]() Given that the piece is about, in essence, the London equivalent of the Chicago mob mixed with Chicago machine politics, the show has a long and apt history in this toddlin’ town. This 1928 composition, a collaboration between Brecht and the composer Kurt Weill, really never goes out of style, and as long as corruption, hypocrisy and virtue signaling remain a constituent part of human behavior, it never will. “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” had an especially amusing ring to it Sunday night at Evanston’s Theo Ubique Theatre, as Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera” proved its pithiness once again. ![]()
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