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Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny in Three New Productions

Feb. 01, 2007

No fewer than three new productions of Weill and Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny are on the boards this month and upcoming in May 2007. Opening February 10, Los Angeles Opera presents seven performances of the opera, directed by John Doyle, with an all-star cast featuring four-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald as Jenny, Patti Lupone in her L.A. Opera debut as Begbick and tenor Anthony Dean Griffey as the doomed lumberjack Jim.  James Conlon, in his first season as music director, conducts.  Opera Boston mounts three performances beginning February 23, 2007 featuring Amy Burton in the role of Jenny, the inimitable Joyce Castle as Begbick, and Dan Snyder as Jim.  Gil Rose conducts a new production directed by Sam Helfrich.  Finally, in May 2007, Spoleto Festival USA presents six performances of the Brecht/Weill masterwork with Emmanuel Villaume, Spoleto Festival USA’s Music Director for Opera & Orchestra, at the podium and directed by Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier.

Completed in 1929, Weill collaborated with librettist Bertolt Brecht to create their version of the prototypical western sin city in Mahagonny. The work saw its premiere in Liepzig in 1930 only to be cited as too controversial and was subsequently banned by the Nazi regime. Mahagonny offers a glimpse into the life of the Western boomtowns of the gold-rush era, where money rules, lust runs rampant and the pursuit of pleasure is paramount. Weill’s score crosses over from opera to cabaret to Broadway, incorporating elements of ragtime, jazz, and boisterous music hall numbers.  Bernard Holland of the New York Times writes of the score:

"Brecht’s socialist passions found a friend in Weill’s sophisticated embrace of popular music. In abrasive harmonies and stern counterpoint, one hears vestiges of the composer's once-rigorous modernism, but this is predominantly the Kurt Weill of smoky bars and parades: long, sinuous, deceptively simple melodies that at their best soar with anthem-like power. The brass-heavy orchestrations tootle with paradoxical good humor."

Los Angeles Opera’s production of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny runs from February 10 through March 4. For precise dates and tickets, please visit www.losangelesopera.com.

For precise times and tickets for Opera Boston's February 23, 25 and 27 performances, please visit www.operaboston.com.

More about the Spoleto Festival USA’s production can be found at www.spoletousa.org.

Further information on Kurt Weill and his works can be found at www.kwf.org and www.eamdllc.com.

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