Ferocious Parable

By Otto Friedrich

When Bertolt Brecht created his legendary Mahagonny, that "City of Nets" where every pleasure is for sale, he neglected to specify exactly where it was. It was originally thought to be the Nazi-threatened Berlin of the 1920s, but the libretto that he wrote for Kurt Weill's most ambitious opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), seems to be set on a wildly imaginary Florida Gold Coast. But to Jonathan Miller, the gifted British director who was commissioned to stage a new Mahagonny at the enterprising, young Los Angeles Music Center Opera, there could be only one locale. "Hollywood," he said before last week's opening night, "seemed to be a living metaphor."

What gave him that idea was Kafka's Amerika. "I was thinking about how he and Brecht and others saw America. Obviously, they got their ideas from the movies, the Keystone Kops, Chaplin. You think of these guys sitting in poky little movie houses in Central Europe in the 1920s watching these flickering images. As far as they were concerned, everything in America was all in the same place. You rode down Fifth Avenue straight into Monument Valley."

Miller carries out this scheme almost too subtly, turning the City of Nets into a collection of pseudo movie sets, illuminated by camera lights. "I haven't made the references to Los Angeles too explicit, because that demythologizes it. I set Mahagonny in a film studio, but there is no attempt & to have real scenery. I don't press too hard."

There is a nice irony in Brecht's ferocious parable of capitalist greed playing in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, that pillared temple of capitalist philanthropy. The parable itself, though, is rather silly. Brecht was a brilliant playwright and poet, but his ideas were pure Stalin-era blustering. As a viewer sits watching the hero Jimmy get executed for having been unable to pay his bar bill, he can only marvel at the gorgeous music Weill provided for this nonsense.

That music is admirably presented by Kent Nagano, 37, a long-maned Californian who has guest-conducted widely and won a solid reputation for his performances of works by such contemporaries as Olivier Messiaen and Steve Reich. His reading of Mahagonny is sharp, clear and briskly energetic (even a bit too much so in the lovely "cranes duet"). Gary Bachlund brings an appropriate touch of Nelson Eddy to the role of the doomed hero, though Anna Steiger (daughter of Rod) plays Jenny with a less happy touch of Jeanette MacDonald. As Lotte Lenya taught a whole generation of admirers, Weill's heroines should sound sexy, metallic and bitter.

Mahagonny marks the start of a big season for Weill, who would have been 90 next March. The Threepenny Opera, with Sting as Mack the Knife, began previews in Washington last week and moves to Broadway in October. Menahem Golan soon plans to release a freewheeling film adaptation starring Raul Julia and Julia Migenes. There will be Weill festivals in Cleveland, London and Dusseldorf, and lots of new recordings. The Los Angeles Mahagonny makes an interesting beginning.

With reporting by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles