One of America’s first post-war productions of The Threepenny Opera opened at Northwestern in February 1948, and records reveal it was an appropriately low-dive affair. The orchestra was just a drummer, a pianist and a Hammond Solovox – an early synthesizer that could handle only one note at a time. True to the famous disclaimer that prefaces the first act, that ragged run nearly six decades ago must have been “conceived with a splendor only a beggar could imagine.”

The same bravura spirit that fueled the shoestring enterprise of those mid-century students appears to have descended on the current cast and crew of The Threepenny Opera, who tonight will launch the School of Music’s 2005-2006 opera season by revisiting the classic 1928 collaboration of German dramatist Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill.

This time, however, under the tutelage of opera director Noel Koran and the baton of Music Professor Frederick Ockwell, the company has approached their material with a notably less sordid sense of splendor.

Weill and Brecht matched their considerable talents to deflate bourgeois hypocrisy, and this work sends up numerous musical and dramatic cliches.

“Weill’s primary innovation is a remarkably stripped-down simplicity which lies at the opposite pole from the complex music favored by other early-20th century German composers,” says NU musicology Prof. Jesse Rosenberg. “In works from the 1920s, his music retains a certain amount of European-modernist angularity; it acknowledges popular influences while largely remaining apart from them.”

Brecht’s theory of “epic theater” relies on “alienation effects” to pique the critical faculties of his audience, and Weill composed his score with the intention of setting up a dialectic between words and music, Rosenberg says.

“A complicated and dissonant harmonic treatment of an otherwise simple melody creates another, more figurative level of dissonance,” Rosenberg says. “But you need to keep in mind that sometimes the very reverse alienation effect occurs as well. Sometimes there is sweetly, conservative Romantic harmony which underscores a vile situation.”

The “small but brassy” band of eight lacks strings, Ockwell says, and challenges the unamplified singers to make themselves heard without compromising the clarity of their diction, rendered here in Marc Blitzstein’s 1954 English adaptation.

The opera is punctuated by spoken dialogue, and stretches of the songs are only half-sung. Supertitles retranslate the lyrics into the original German, and – beamed onto a pair of screens that flank the curtain – Brecht’s dictums illuminating the action alternate with projections of Expressionist woodblock prints. Sandwiching the misty and eerily glowing stage, these images complement the actors’ frippery and garish make-up to compose a scene that recalls the hell of a Bosch triptych.

Brecht’s proto-Marxist narrative is a deliberately disjointed retelling – after The Beggar’s Opera, an 18th-century ballad opera by John Gay – of the fate of Macheath, a ruthless crime boss of Dickensian London. Portrayed by Music graduate student Andrew Johnson, “Mack the Knife” cuts the figure of a thin-lipped Jazz Age mobster.

An irresistible undercurrent of dark comedy is the vehicle for Brecht’s cynical message. Macheath and his gang of goons have mastered the murkiest channels of the urban underworld by pocketing the overanxious chief of police, played by mustachioed Music senior Paul Corona. The opera closes with the tragic hero’s ascent to – and sly descent from – the gallows.

As the Street Singer, Music junior Tate Jorgensen narrates the story and delivers ironic asides from his perch at far stage right, periodically puncturing the theatrical illusion. In Jorgensen’s reading, the world behind the scrim issues entirely from his character’s imagination. Decked in jailbird stripes, the Street Singer crooks his back into a grotesque hunch and peers into the audience, a gargoyle vainly straining to come to life.

Brecht called The Threepenny Opera “a play with music,” and Koran acknowledges the uselessness of fixing the work with any other label. “It’s its own category,” he says. “I treat it as lyric theater. It’s not what one would consider a piece of classical music theater. It stands all the conventions on their head so that they’re hard to recognize. But it is seriously composed music. It would be a challenge for anyone to master.”

This is the major reason that Koran – aware that Weill composed the songs for actors who do not necessarily possess “legitimate” voices – chose this work to exercise his classically trained pupils. “It fills a lot of our students’ needs,” Koran says. “It has a lot of roles and a variety of styles – jazz, operetta, cabaret, classical. I think students need to be exposed to all of them. And, of course, it just makes for wonderful theater.”

The Threepenny Opera is playing at Cahn Auditorium, 600 Emerson St., Nov. 17 through Nov. 19. Tickets and showtimes are available online at www.pickstaiger.com or by calling (847) 491-5441.4

Medill senior Thomas Berenato is a PLAY writer. He can be reached at [email protected].