A handful of times in operatic history, a composer has thrown away the rule book and produced a work which defies categorisation because it simply isn't like anything else in the repertoire. Kurt Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper is one such work: musically and dramatically, neither Weill himself or anyone else has ever written anything remotely similar.
It helps when your librettist is one of the great ground-breaking dramatists of history. The "Threepenny Opera" is Berthold Brecht's response to the financial and political catastrophe that enveloped Germany in the 1920s. Brecht was very young and very angry: the drama proceeds at an exuberant pace, the humour is blacker than black, the language is biting, sardonic and riotously funny. As in many of his works, Brecht took an established piece, John Gay's 18th century The Beggar's Opera (itself a fine satire on both the politics of its day and the conventions of Italian opera) and twisted and updated it to his own theatrical and political ends.
But Weill made Die Dreigroschenoper into something far more than a vehicle for Brecht's political agenda. Where most operas, even the great ones, have only a tiny number of really memorable numbers, Die Dreigroschenoper brims with highlights: I can count a dozen (to include the famous pair of The Ballad of Mack the Knife and Pirate Jenny). The musical style is made unique by the sheer level of melodic invention: several of the numbers are made of several melodies woven together (one in the voice, others in instrumental accompaniment), the harmonic progressions are rarely simple and the rhythmic styles are borrowed from everywhere from church chorales and Beethoven sturm und drang to romantic melodrama, jazz and tango.
First prize of the evening goes to the production team. Director and co-set designer John Ramster clearly took to heart Brecht's trademarked principle of Verfremdungseffekt (translated as "defamiliarization" or, misleadingly, "alienation") in which the dramatist uses a series of techniques to take the audience out of its comfort zone and render it more susceptible to surprise and wonderment. We were continually on the receiving end of small surprises: blue flashing lights on policemen's helmets, a large silver lamé pound sign on the long skirt of Jenny the whore, a pastiche Broadway showtune dance of Macheath and his captors (complete with ostrich feathers), an Egyptian headdress worn by Peachum as he warns the police chief Tiger Brown of the fate of his equivalent in ancient Egypt, or any of the brilliant pieces of choreography for the ensemble numbers. The cast kept up a blistering speed throughout the evening, and their acting quality shone: every cast member gave us crisp, telling renderings of their characters (in many cases, several each; eight performers played a total of a couple of dozen parts).