Perfection’s Veneer

Review – The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Royal Opera House, Thursday 12 March 2015)

Leocadia Begbick – Anne Sofie von Otter
Fatty – Peter Hoare
Trinity Moses – Willard W. White
Jenny – Christine Rice
Jimmy McIntyre – Kurt Streit
Jack O’Brien – Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts
Bank-Account Bill – Darren Jeffrey
Alaska Wolf Joe – Neal Davies
Toby Higgins – Hubert Francis
Six Girls – Anna Burford, Lauren Fagan, Anush Hovhannisyan, Stephanie Marshall, Meeta Raval & Harriet Williams
Voice – Paterson Joseph

Director – John Fulljames
Set Designs – Es Devlin
Costume Designs – Christina Cunningham
Lighting Design – Bruno Poet
Video Designs – Finn Ross

Royal Opera Chorus
Orchestra of the Royal Opera

Mark Wigglesworth (Conductor)

I ate and was never full, I drank and was always still thirsty. Somebody give me a glass of water!”

Jimmy McIntyre’s last words just before his execution could also be a fitting epitaph for the Royal Opera House’s first ever production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.

It was a smart and – on the whole – well-performed and executed production. But there was a gloss to it that meant that ultimately it failed to convince.

In the programme, Kasper Holten identified the contradictions of this work – a full-blown opera with ‘anti-opera’ elements, but ultimately what we got was just opera. There was no sense of the radicalism – musically or otherwise – that made Brecht and Weill’s collaboration so controversial when it was first performed.

It was – in it’s search for perfection – all too polite. There was no sense of corruption and decadence – of seediness – required by Brecht and Weill’s words and music to make this production of Mahagonny really work.

In the pit Mark Wigglesworth – soon to be Music Director at ENO – conducted without any sense of verve interpretation or attention to the score. And he didn’t draw from the orchestra a palette of sound that was anything but operatic. That lack of colour so required for Weill’s music ultimately meant that for the most part the orchestra sounded bland. Ironically it seemed that the only louche-ness in the pit came from the lazy attention to rhythm that again undermined the composer’s music.

The singing – while on the whole strong – also came a cropper. Christine Rice – for example – sounded glorious but glorious wasn’t what was needed. She didn’t capture the emotional ennui of Jenny, nor her coldness. It’s rare to hear Anne Sofie von Otter on stage at Covent Garden, and this was a wasted opportunity. She is a singer I admire, not only for her Baroque performances, but a repertoire that also includes chansons as well as a notable album with Elvis Costello. But here, she was lost and seemed more caricature that characterful. And this was true of Peter Hoare, Willard White, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, Darren Jeffrey and Neal Davies. In any opera they would have been superb, but here vocally they were unconvincing and dramatically, ciphers.

And personally, Kurt Streit was simply miscast as Jimmy. He lacked both the flexibility and vocal amplitude that the music required, often sounding uncomfortably strained and like the others dramatically unconvincing. In the final scene – when John Fulljames seemed to finally find a dramatic rhythm – it was too late for Streit to redeem the production despite being offered so overtly to the audience as the ultimate Redeemer.

However plaudits must go to the Royal Opera Chorus that was impressive especially in the Second and Third Acts.

The production, like the performances, lacked punch although Es Devlin ensured that visually it was smart. She made clever use of shipping containers and projections and the set for the second act was very impressive. In some ways, Fulljames’ grandiose – and again overly operatic – approach to the story was ultimately the production. Feeling for the most part overblown, as if trying too hard to fit the stage, the director distracted from the simplicity of the story itself. And at times I did wonder why Mahagonny – and not Orfeo – was scheduled for The Roundhouse or a similar venue. I thought the attempt to tie Brecht’s tornado to global warming was clumsy at best, and ultimately never felt that Fulljames’ attempt to “modernise’ the author’s critique of capitalism was convincing.

As I have already mentioned, the “Jesus” moment at the end was effective but mainly because it stood in stark relief to the general weakness of the production overall and wasn’t enough to rescue the evening.

The Rise and fall of the City of Mahagonny is a story of the power, corruption, desire and ultimately the failure of immorality. It’s in the words. It’s in the music. It should permeate and soak into both the production and the audience should leave at the end of the evening feeling ever so slightly sullied.

Sadly Covent Garden’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny only felt ike a night at the opera. Nothing more.

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