Blood and fire in song

Craig Smith |

4/24/2008 - 4/25/08

Gangster glorification was all the rage during the first decades of the 20th century, and audiences couldn't seem to get enough of it. So it was the perfect era for that collaborative duo of mean-street theater, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. Between 1928 and 1933, the German composer and librettist produced four works in which bad consistently trumped good: the sharp-edged musicals The Threepenny Opera and Happy End, the wicked ballet-with-songs The Seven Deadly Sins, and the gloomy but electric opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.

Some of the works did very well when they premiered; others didn't. Later on, Weill immigrated to the U.S., where he wrote some more cheerful (or at least moderately hopeful) shows, including Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus, and Lost in the Stars.

But those earlier Weill-Brecht essays still resonate today, for wickedness never goes out of style. And while they offer stylistic and practical performance and production challenges, they are also great stage pieces.

The College of Santa Fe's performing-arts department steps up to the challenge with its first production of 1929's Happy End. Set in 1919 Chicago, it tells how a woman with a checkered past, now a street evangelist, falls for, woos, and redeems a criminal mastermind. But then everyone from cops to robbers decides to turn on authority and tear down the establishment. It seems true that love can't bring you everything.

CSF's production is directed and choreographed by Campbell Martin. Music direction is by Gail Springer; costumes are by Cheryl Odom; sets are by David Minkoff; and lighting is by George Johnson. Tom Maguire conducts.

"You kind of wonder what this is about," Martin said about Happy End. "You have to do a lot of research. It's not like Oklahoma! You can't get up on a hay bale and sing, 'Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'. There's not a lot of humor in the songs, but there's humor in the script, thank God."

For both mood and plot links, Happy End seems indebted to Maurine Dallas Watkins' 1926 play Chicago, based on the true-life stories of two female killers of that decade. The play later inspired John Kander and Fred Ebb's 1975 musical of the same name. On the other hand, the theme of a good girl redeeming a bad boy, Martin said, has even earlier roots, in stories such as George Bernard Shaw's 1905 play Major Barbara, in which a young aristocratic woman joins the Salvation Army with consequent social havoc.

Happy End's songs and words are more organically related than those in other musicals, Martin added. "In some musicals, you rely on audience applause to transition into another scene. It doesn't happen here. It's all interwoven. Some songs come out of the blue. It's taken me quite a while to figure what these songs are about.

"I told the students in the auditions that I want every song to be sung as if you're doing
a monologue instead of getting up and singing a show tune. That was a challenge for them, and the challenge remains." But it was another good reason for CSF to mount the show, Martin said. When your program is devoted to preparing students for professional theater, harder is better than softer.

The score is musically rich as well as dramatically demanding, with several well-known numbers: "The Sailors' Tango" and "Surabaya Johnny" are often excerpted in cabaret concerts; "The Bilbao Song," "Time in a Shot Glass," "Song of the Big Shot," and "The Mandalay Song" are almost equally familiar. All of them swirl around and feed the central theme: people are puppets of big government and big business and need to come together to unleash anarchy.

"The script makes big scores against capitalism, and it calls for big portraits of [Henry] Ford and [John D.] Rockefeller [Sr.] to be onstage," Martin said. "I'm not going to use them. I think that no one knows what they looked like anymore. Which is a bit sad.

"The social commentary is interwoven all through. There will be this comical or criminal scene, and then the cops will turn around and say, 'All these crimes, and everyone's innocent.' I think one of the best lines comes out of nowhere when [the character] The Fly says at the end of the show, 'Robbing a bank's no crime compared to owning one.'"

Minkoff's set reflects the show's edge. "It's like being underneath the el in Chicago or Queens or Brooklyn," said Martin. "Everything is made of steel girders; it's cold, not shiny or anything like that. It's very heavy and regimented. Some of the girders are tilted. Everything's out of whack, everything's out of balance.

"The audience will subtly notice, on the steps and levels and platforms of the set, these collages of money. Everything's built on money. Even when you go to the Salvation Army [headquarters], they're built on a foundation of money. To me, in this show, organized religion is just as crooked and evil as the gangsters. They end up the same way at the end. That's part of everything going to the dark side."

In his research, Martin discovered that the show's prologue, as found in the musical score, was originally an epilogue. No matter where it's placed, it's a sarcastic paean, tongue-in-cheek, to Ford, Rockefeller, and the coal and oil businesses. "That's why they got shut down in Berlin. It used music as social criticism, and it made a strong impact on the capitalists and businessmen. And the government."

Martin has reinstated the number as an epilogue in the CSF production. "It makes much more sense that way. The show starts out much simpler. You ease into it rather than having the social message thrown into your face. What I'm having the kids do in the epilogue is losing as much of their costumes as they can. So in that moment there are no leads, no chorus. It's the people."

details

Happy End, presented by the College of Santa Fe

8 p.m. Friday & Saturday, April 25 & 26; 2 p.m. Sunday, April 27; through May 4

Greer Garson Theatre, College of Santa Fe campus, 1600 St. Michael's Drive