Happy End - American Conservatory Theater Cast Recording

The musical Happy End is a glorious mess. When the Berlin producer Aufricht asked Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill for a follow-up to their hugely successful Threepenny Opera, the result was Happy End, which had an unhappy beginning in 1929, failing in about a week. It was billed as "adapted from the English" by one Dorothy Lane.

There was no Dorothy Lane. Several English-language works (not least Shaw's Major Barbara) contributed to the text, whose basic subject is how one Chicago gang fights another, and how it gets enmeshed with the Salvation Army in an anti-capitalist movement—this, as one of the chief gangsters, Bill Cracker, and Salvation Army lieutenant Lillian ("Hallelujah Lil") Holiday become romantically involved. Essentially by Elisabeth Hauptmann, it made use of a few sketchy suggestions by Brecht. The common assumption was that only the lyrics to Weill's tunes were by Brecht himself.

Since then, much has changed. It has been persuasively promoted by the American scholar John Fuegi that much of Brecht's work, in poetry as well as drama, was actually written by his mistresses: Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin and Ruth Berlau, among others. It is now argued that, based on John Gay, about 80 percent of Threepenny was by the highly gifted Hauptmann, whom the amoral Brecht cheated out of most if not all the credit and monetary rewards.

The year 1929 was a fraught time for Brecht. He rejected as wife the beautiful Carola Neher for the plain but more complaisant Helene Weigel while conducting sundry extramarital affairs. He was all over the place in various pursuits, keeping Hauptmann and Weill frustrated awaiting his lyrics as the date for Happy End's premiere approached.

The great songs, the show's chief raison d'etre, are thus also in good part by Hauptmann. The grab bag aspect of the score is evident in that, for instance, "The Ballad of the Lily of Hell" was written by Brecht in 1919 about a communist feminist named Lilly Krause-Prem. The shilly-shallying in the writing of the songs explains why they only very loosely suit the plot, but, as you delightedly listen to them, who cares? With Happy End, freeing songs from the trammels of an untidy plot may even be an advantage.

The premiere's stellar cast comprised Neher as Lillian, Weigel as the gang leader Lady in Grey (a.k.a. the Fly), and an ex-mistress's husband, Theo Lingen, as Jimmy. Future Hollywood stars Oscar Homolka and Peter Lorre appeared as Bill and Nakamura, respectively. The production's quick failure was largely due to Weigel's abandoning the text in Act Three for a communist tract, which the bandleader, Theo Mackeben, tried to drown out. But, as Fuegi remarks, "Nobody could drown out Weigel."

Numbers like "The Sailors' Tango," "The Mandalay Song" and the heart-wrenching "Surabaya Johnny" are masterpieces shoehorned into the show; others are more germane. Either way, there is no weak link here, and the American Conservatory Theater's June 2006 production, on which the new Ghostlight Records CD is based, is, even without stars, thoroughly professional.

Michael Feingold's translation is idiomatic and felicitous, faithful without being slavish. One might have minor cavils: Why is the famous line "Founding a bank is more criminal than robbing one" changed to "Owning a bank…" etc.? The lyric of "Surabaya Johnny" loses something by its refrain's lacking an important rhyme.

But never mind. This indispensable CD will be reprised by its owners more often than a four-letter word in a David Mamet play.