For the next three weeks you have a choice in how you stay informed about current events: You can either suffer through another local newscast as the tone whiplashes between banal levity and grim images of oppression, crime and human misery — or you can soak up the horrible truth at New Line Theatre’s near-perfect production of The Threepenny Opera.
The opening number from New Line Theatre’s production of the show will make even diehard Darin fans – like me – find a whole new feeling in that song.
“The Threepenny Opera” is the oldest show New Line Theatre has ever staged.
It might also be the hottest, the sharpest and the best.
New Line Theatre gives us the Brecht/Weill collaboration I’ve imagined in my mind after only hearing select musical pieces, and watching a fuzzy copy of G.W. Pabst’s 1931 film. This is true art, and a show that you absolutely need to see!
Then Macheath’s gang, Brian Claussen, Kent Coffel, Todd “The Boss” Micali, and Luke Steingruby did appear, dear,
Having stolen the wedding bash…
The Threepenny Opera is a contradiction in several ways. It’s simultaneously comedic and bleak, energetic and gloomy. It’s a story without any real heroes, but where some villains are more villainous than others. It’s a classic that I’d never seen before, and New Line’s latest production has proven to be a memorable introduction.
Brian Claussen, Kent Coffel, Todd Micali and Luke Steingruby are effectively comical as Macheath’s gang, as well.
From a director who usually looks backward in time for context, and also revels in the shocking, we now get the biggest shock of all: that this 1928 show, one of the highlights of the German Weimar period, seems to have snapped out of hopelessness and morphed into the first rebellious musical of the “post-Ferguson” era.
The New Line Theatre has presented edgy and off-beat musicals in St. Louis since 1991, but they have never put on The Threepenny Opera before. Artistic Director Scott Miller is about to change that…
New Line Theatre, “the bad boy of musical theatre,” closes its 24th season of adult, alternative musical theatre in June with one of the masterpieces of the art form, the darkly satiric THREEPENNY OPERA (which isn’t really an opera), running now through June 20, 2015. BroadwayWorld has a first look at the cast in action below!
Luke Steingruby 