Review
A KURT WEILL CABARET
Calgary Opera
Starring Jean Stilwell and Kathyrn Pollack
Directed and choreographed by Vicki Adams Willis
Runs March 18 and 19
Calgary Petroleum Club
The title A Kurt Weill Cabaret may conjure up images of the smoky Kit Kat Klub, Weimar decadence, buxom chorus girls in fishnets and a sleazy emcee.
Well, this isn’t that cabaret, old chum.
Calgary Opera’s Weill revue is an elegant affair, staged in the Calgary Petroleum Club – which reeks of old money, but not decadence – with well-groomed male singers in tuxedos and not a fishnet stocking in sight. The naughtiest touch may be the female lead singer’s discreet tattoos (yes, even opera singers have them). And, in these smoke-free times, the haze hanging over the room has had to be artificially created.
In this atmosphere, Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Seven Deadly Sins, the cabaret’s centrepiece, comes off less like the mockery of bourgeois values it was intended to be and more like a recitation of character flaws. But then, the fault lies as much with the work as the staging. This was the famous German duo’s final collaboration, in Paris in 1933, and Weill only asked Brecht to write the libretto because he couldn’t get Jean Cocteau. A song-and-dance cycle, it follows the fortunes of a young woman named Anna who leaves her family in Louisiana to find work in various big American cities, where she succumbs to each of the seven deadlies in turn, which impede her from being a good little capitalist. Two performers portray Anna simultaneously, with Anna I, the singer (Jean Stilwell), representing the sensible side of her personality, and Anna II, the dancer (Kathryn Pollack), embodying her impulsive side.
Brecht’s writing here is less than inspired and as a songwriting team he and Weill failed to create anything as distinctive as "Pirate Jenny," "Alabama Song" or "Surabaya Johnny" from their better-known works, The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny and Happy End. However, Stillwell and Pollack make an admirable attempt to breathe life into it, under the direction of Decidedly Jazz Danceworks’ Vicki Adams Willis, who captures some of the flavour of a ’30s European salon entertainment. Mezzo-soprano Stilwell, sharp-featured and sporting an Annie Lennox haircut, makes for a severe but by no means humorless superego, while Pollack plays the wanton id with both the looks and exaggerated gestures of a silent-film heroine. The two, clad in shades of red, might easily pass as sisters, if not two sides of the same woman. The production uses W.H. Auden’s old translation and a new, two-piano arrangement by John Estacio (Filumena) played by Peter Tiefenbach and Ron Bennie.
Just like double-sided Anna, there is a Kurt Weill I and a Kurt Weill II. The evening’s second half leaves behind Kurt I, the European composer, to highlight his later career co-writing Broadway shows. Weill certainly had good taste when it came to picking collaborators; his lyricists during his American period included the poet Langston Hughes, the humorist Ogden Nash and George Gershwin’s songwriting brother Ira. The musicals they devised are largely forgotten now, but some of the songs have survived, such as "I’m a Stranger Here Myself," "Speak Low" and the much-covered "September Song."
The fun, though, is in discovering ones you’ve never heard before. And the second half allows the show’s quartet of male singers, who only serve as a chorus on Seven Deadly Sins, to pull out the stops. Bass Alain Coulombe rumbles forth "Thousands of Miles" from the Weill-Maxwell Anderson 1949 musical about South Africa, Lost in the Stars, while tenor Eric Shaw serves up some urban melancholy with the Hughes-penned "Lonely House" from his and Weill’s opera version of Elmer Rice’s Street Scene. My mother’s favourite (yes, this is a show you’d take your mother to) was baritone Curtis Sullivan, who delivers the wistful "September Song" from Knickerbocker Holiday. Things get a bit goofy, however, when James McLennan adopts a burlesque New Yawk accent for "The Trouble With Women."
Stilwell joins the guys, vamping it up on "Who’ll Buy" (a song, also from Lost in the Stars, that pre-dates Kate Bush in making a list of produce items sound sexy), and playing a playful love goddess on "Speak Low" from One Touch of Venus. Pollack embellishes the tunes with more dance stylings, while Tiefenbach, bassist John Hyde and percussionist Marianne Stadnyk furnish the tasteful accompaniment.
In the end, though, it’s Weill’s work with Brecht that has the most enduring artistic significance and this cabaret bows to that. The encore takes us full circle, with the company performing the Louis Armstrong-Bobby Darin version of a song from The Threepenny Opera – "Mack the Knife." |
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