Penny ante New Rep’s Brechtian vaudeville BY CAROLYN CLAY
	The Threepenny Opera Music by Kurt Weill. Adaptation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and lyrics by Bertolt Brecht. English translation of dialogue by Robert MacDonald. English translation of lyrics by Jeremy Sams. Directed by Rick Lombardo. Musical direction by Todd C. Gordon. Choreography by Kelli Edwards. Set by Peter Colao. Costumes by Frances Nelson McSherry. Lighting by John Ambrosone. With Leigh Barrett, Paul D. Farwell, Brian Robinson, Nancy E. Carroll, Todd Alan Johnson, Susan Molloy, Steven Barkhimer, and Stacey Cervellino. At New Repertory Theatre through February 8.

The shark’s teeth can be lethal, warns the opening lyric of "Mack the Knife" as transformed by Britisher Jeremy Sams into "The Flick Knife Song." The question is whether The Threepenny Opera can be as well, or whether it’s revivable largely for Kurt Weill’s lilting music. New Repertory Theatre artistic director Rick Lombardo, reuniting some of the outstanding singer-actors from last season’s potent chamber Sweeney Todd, uses a near-future-set translation by Robert MacDonald of the 1928 work that was unveiled at London’s Donmar Warehouse in 1994. Here a depressed klatch of the poor, holed up in an abandoned theater over which helicopters periodically clatter, anticipates some coming horror as well as the current Prince of Wales’s imminent coronation as King William V. As they wait, these 21st-century beggars, gotten up in shards of costume that suggest Victoriana crossed with a clown show, put on a sordid little vaudeville festooned with cartoon sound effects and silent-movie tricks. Some of the overlay seems forced and fussy, and Sweeney Todd star Todd Alan Johnson’s Macheath doesn’t hit his chilling stride until act two. But the deliberately ragged enterprise, complete with clown make-up, is a far cry from Bobby Darin crooning about the feared fish’s pearly whites.

Most of us are used to the Marc Blitzstein adaptation of Brecht/Weill’s lower-depths send-up of ruthless capitalism and bourgeois romance that has been popular since the play’s initial American success, Off Broadway in 1954. Both MacDonald’s translation and Sams’s lyrics are blunter and nastier; like the original, which was based on John Gay’s 1728 The Beggar’s Opera, this version of the tale of the womanizing Macheath and his brush with the gallows is set in a London of Brecht’s imagining and is thick with cockney-speak. A notion of the production seems to be that some of the beggars, presenting their entertainment as a sort of endgame, and stopping every so often to hold their collective breath against Armageddon or at the very least a blackout, are better actors than others; those playing Mack’s gang are portrayed as particularly inept.

The action is crammed onto a small, multi-level stage, festive but peeling, at the top of which a seven-piece band led by musical director and keyboardist Todd C. Gordon work their competent way through Weill’s distinctive score, occasionally offering a fillip like the theme from The Godfather. Often hauling a standing mike about, the principals are positioned for their star turns at the top of the cramped, stepped stage — which is reminiscent of the Kit Kat Klub about to be demolished à la Follies. When not involved in the action, the "actors" sit impassively on the sidelines in wooden chairs. Sometimes aggressively, sometimes sullenly, they clap one another on.

Lombardo’s intentions aren’t always clear — why is Steven Barkhimer’s corrupt police commissioner, Tiger Brown, a toy soldier? The director busies the material to create subtext while discouraging sentimentality, and he bathes the enterprise in both a literal and a depressive haze. The hearty amateurism of some of the beggar players creates a sort of Verfremdungseffekt in itself.

The production starts well, with Leigh Barrett’s mournful yet unflinching Pirate Jenny delivering the tougher version of "Mack the Knife" — which plainly paints the lady-killing crime king as a sadistic killer — with heart-stopping anger and tenderness. Before she’s done, Johnson’s imposing Mack is in her face, flick-knife gleaming, but choosing to wound her with a kiss.

There is also a fine showing by Nancy E. Carroll as Mrs. Peachum, the pickled wife of "beggar king" J.J. Peachum, who makes his living pimping for the poor and exploiting the sensibilities of the rich (who create misery but can’t bear to look at it), and mother of Macheath’s latest conquest, Polly. Emerging from a grimy laundry hamper with a bottle of hooch, Carroll’s Mrs. P., in a bustled waistcoat and tights, with a large plastic purse hanging from her like a holster, brings a slinky, purring mezzo to "The Ballad of Sexual Imperative" and visible effort to staying upright on her liquor-loosened pinions. Paul Farwell’s burger-esque, vaudevillean Peachum is also accomplished, if too jolly.

As the petulant, platinum-blonde Polly, Susan Molloy puts a slinky baby-doll sheen on "Barbara Song," though her "Pirate Jenny" ship doesn’t quite come in. Johnson’s first-act Macheath is at first melancholic, even a bit unsure; once he gets cracking, he exudes a deadly whimsy and, cornered, is almost messianic — way too forceful to be held by any little, portable piece of jail. Like his performance, the production may jell. Opening weekend, it gleamed a couple of pennies’ worth but seemed about a cent short.