Critics Take in Roundabout's Revival of The Threepenny Opera

The Roundabout Theatre Company revival of The Threepenny Opera features two Tony winners Alan Cumming and Jim Dale, two recording stars Cyndi Lauper and Nellie McKay and a former Saturday Night Live star who has crossed over into musical theater Ana Gasteyer. The eclectic bunch faced critics when the musical opened at Studio 54 on April 20. Were reviewers happy Macheath is back in town?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

Rob Kendt in his Broadway.com Review: "Ouch! Broadway's new Threepenny Opera hurts—the eyes, the brain, and, at close to three hours, the ass. It's not so hard on the ears, as music director Kevin Stites makes Kurt Weill's prickly neo-classical score glitter and glare. But director Scott Elliott, using a showily crude and oddly spliced new translation by playwright Wallace Shawn, has turned Bertolt Brecht's 1928 play, about petit-bourgeois capitalists whose trades happen to be murder, fraud, and prostitution, into a dull hodgepodge of unfunny comedy sketches and he's dressed it in the semi-contemporary drag of Isaac Mizrahi's pointedly ugly costumes."

Ben Brantley of The New York Times: "With Mr. Elliott overseeing a cast jam-packed with misused talent including the pop stars Cyndi Lauper and Nellie McKay, this Threepenny takes Brecht's notion of the theater of alienation to new self-defeating extremes… The performances are… widely varied and… bereft of character-defining purpose. Everything seems done for isolated shock effect, without any regard to how one stylistic component might relate to another, so it's impossible to intuit exactly what society is being skewered."

Clive Barnes of The New York Post: "Director Scott Elliott obviously decided to go for broke in making the production as authentically Brechtian as he could, even having Wallace Shawn prepare a new and gritty version of the original German text by Brecht and Elizabeth Hauptmann. But authentic is as authentic does, and in The Threepenny Opera, authenticity can come at an awesome price: a touch of boredom… The three possible reasons to see this weirdly misconceived production: Lauper as the forlorn whore Jenny, and Dale and Gasteyer as Mr. and Mrs. Peachum, Polly's parents - the criminal masterminds of Brecht's Victorian London."

Howard Kissel of The New York Daily News: "Had the original 1928 production been as listless and numbing as the revival Scott Elliott has directed at Studio 54… the work would have been quickly forgotten… The main reason Threepenny has survived is Weill's score, especially 'Mack the Knife.' One of the few worthwhile things about this revival is that it retains his orchestrations, which still, 80 years later, sound remarkably fresh. The melodies themselves are often muffled because the lyrics, in a new translation by Wallace Shawn, are so clumsy and ill-fitting. Shawn has also made the spoken text unusually crude."

David Rooney of Variety: "While the cast is game and talented, the production is sunk by its one-note sleaziness and puerile provocation. Forget alienation effect, this is just plain off-putting. Given that it clobbers you over the head with surfaced subtext for nearly three hours, the show should come with a migraine warning."

Michael Kuchwara of The Associated Press: "Excess seems to be the hallmark of this lengthy nearly three hours, misguided production, with a coarse new translation by Wallace Shawn… If there's a concept for this scattered production, it seems to have eluded the director and the performers. Even the set and costume designs are all over the map… The actors seem to be stylistically playing in different shows. Some, most notably the marvelous Jim Dale, are better than others."

Elysa Gardner of USA Today: "The ingredients add up to a mess. Elliott and translator Wallace Shawn try really hard to make Brecht's ferocious material newly subversive, but their four-letter words and gender-bending touches merely seem gratuitous and silly. Cumming is neither as threatening nor as thrilling as he was on his romp through Weimar Berlin… McKay fares better at first, though her mock-bright demureness grows tedious… Lauper delivers her usual strong voice and New Yawk accent, which hardly seems out of place here, since each character seems to come from a different city. I counted four different dialects in the Peachum household alone, two be- longing to Ana Gasteyer's overwrought Mrs. Peachum. The show's brightest spot is Jim Dale's nimble Mr. Peachum."

Linda Winer of Newsday: "Scott Elliott's production, which the Roundabout Theatre Company opened last night at the aptly resonant Studio 54, is an almost-three-hour cavalcade of doggedly conscientious debauchery and pretend subversion. Despite the promise of a wildly seductive crossover cast including the endearing Cyndi Lauper and the terrific Nellie McKay, the much-anticipated revival feels more like a postdecadence fashion show than Brecht's unsentimental satire about beggars and murderers, whores and rapists and the capitalists who outsleaze them."