Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny - ENO ★★★★

Suitably attired for some opera on a cold and rainy night, it’s back to the London Coliseum for a look at another one of the productions being offered as part of the English National Opera‘s winter season. The ENO has provided audiences with a wide variety of shows over the colder months, including crowd-pleasing Gilbert & Sullivan and Mozart operas, but it is also putting on a very short run of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s satirical exposition Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. With only three evening performances scheduled and this review from the first, it means that you only have the chance to catch it on the 18th and 20th this week. It’s a very adult opera composed nearly a century ago containing expletives plus allusions to sex acts and brutality, so it is not for the faint-hearted. It promises “an evening that will entertain, challenge, and leave you reflecting long after the curtain falls”. So, will this subject matter be too challenging for even the most ardent of opera lovers, or will this production be the jewel in the crown for the ENO this season? Well, it’s a spectacular show with disconcerting themes, a memorable human hurricane and some dissonant melodies encompassing a beating heart of ragtime to wrap your ears and eyes around.

The story revolves around the fictional American city of Mahagonny, which has been founded by three criminals fleeing from the police (Fatty the bookkeeper, Trinity Moses and the Widow Begbick) after their escape vehicle breaks down in the desert. They make it into a town of excess, corruption and indulgence where money can purchase anything that its inhabitants desire. Begbick is the driving force behind the plan, and she explains that it means they can take advantage of the gullible, greedy and idle who are attracted to the place. This includes a group of lumberjacks who have made a lot of cash working in Alaska, and the story follows their choices and ill fate as they spend that cash. Over the course of three acts with one interval, the audience is treated to the imagery of a place where pleasure is valued above all else and where the characters are unrestrained and prostitution is rife. There are consequential scenes involving overeating, sex, drinking until you spew, violent death and execution. Finally the whole pack of cards collapses, and the city of sinners destroys itself, ending with the depressing message that you can’t help a dead man.

Composer Kurt Weill is well-known for his fusion of musical styles, and many of his compositions are still being covered by popular musicians. In Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, he mixes up the standard orchestral opera style with the more unconventional sounds that were prevalent in 1920s American music. Playwright Bertolt Brecht took the ideas of Weill, as well as Elisabeth Hauptmann and Casper Neher, to shape his disturbing libretto in German. Now helpfully translated by Jeremy Sams into English, the powerful and chaotic melodies of Weill lock horns with those unsettling and impactful words initially created by Brecht.

Conductor Andre de Ridder is the ENO’s Music Director Designate, and he has chosen to make this production his first conducting role with the ENO’s orchestra as he prepares to take up the post next year. He handles it with a confidence and vigour that the musicians and opera aficionados clearly love. It’s a difficult piece with some strident rhythms, and occasionally the music overpowers the voices on stage, so the surtitles need to be followed to enjoy Brecht (Sams)’s observations. However, Weill’s score does conjure up the sounds of the Deep South mixed with notes that are more Berlin than Alabama, and the second and third acts have some rousing choral numbers involving the entire cast underpinned with sweeping strings, bringing each section to its dramatic crescendo in the manner of more traditional operas.

Director Jamie Manton (The Cunning Little Vixen, Paul Bunyan) has been making a name for himself in London, with two of his previous ENO shows having been nominated for Olivier Awards. He has managed to find the menace, chaos and a little bit of quirkiness contained within the subtext of this unsettling story. He combines an imaginative interpretation of the story with experienced handling of the singers to elicit crackling performances from everyone. He is aided by choreography courtesy of Lizzie Gee (Ride the Cyclone, High Noon) that brings some levity to an otherwise dour narrative. It is inspired to turn the threat of a hurricane at the end of act one into a number where Adam Taylor crazily tap dances around the stage, swirling increasingly frenetically, dressed up as a bright red typhoon with an arrow and exclamation mark on his head, and Jimmy the lumberjack, played by New Zealand-born tenor Simon O’Neill, swings suspended orange lamps around to simulate the oncoming storm. They also have fun with the eating and sex scenes in the second act, undressing the ensemble to their underwear, leaving piles of clothes strewn at the front of the stage as they line up to engage in lewd acts.

O’Neill (Die Walküre, Tristan und Isolde, Das Rheingold) as angry and unfortunate lumberjack Jimmy MacIntyre dominates the stage with his powerful heldentenor voice. It is his story that binds the narrative. He demands understanding and sympathy from the audience as he journeys from embittered worker, through periods of hedonism, towards his inevitable yet unjust death, giving the most tender performance at the end. This production also showcases some younger talent that has been nurtured by the ENO, with tenor Elgan Llŷr Thomas playing lumberjack Jack O’Brian and baritone Alex Otterburn taking on the role of Bank-Account Billy. The final lumberjack is British bass David Shipley as Alaska Wolf Joe, whose body becomes goulash when he fights for money. South African tenor Zwakele Tshabalala is also another former ENO Harewood Artist, and he sings Toby Higgins.

British mezzo soprano Rosie Aldridge (Parsifal, Hansel und Gretel, Katya Kabanova) is the widow Leokadja Begbick. Aldridge relishes being the leader of her gang and delivers a strong and impressive rendition of her part whilst displaying her considerable vocal range. She is joined by American bass-baritone Kenneth Kellogg‘s (Don Giovanni, Faust, Cosi fan tutte) rich and subtle voice as he strides the stage with his menacing portrayal of Trinity Moses. Fatty the bookkeeper is faithfully and solidly performed by British tenor Mark Le Brocq (Death in Venice, Das Rheingold, Tristan und Isolde), who completes the pack of immoral and grasping criminal overlords.

Jenny Smith, the lead prostitute, is expressively sung and agilely acted by Australian-American soprano Danielle de Niese. She pulls your focus on the stage by delivering a performance full of movement, brittleness and mockery. Her character knows the choices she has made, and she will stick to them. De Niese is theatrically talented and a very believable sex worker. She has to carry the refrain that she’d rather be the one doing the kicking than the one being kicked. It’s a tough part to play, as her unsympathetic character remains hard-hearted to the very end.

This production is visually striking, with set and costume designer Milla Clarke pulling the audience into the murky world of brothels and whisky bars using a stark set and no covers to the rear and sides. Everything is on display, including the props, lighting and rigging in the wings. At the back there are rostra where the chorus can sit and observe the story play out. There are treadmills to give the illusion that the working girls and lumberjacks are travelling to Mahagonny as they sing of their desires. The stage is dominated by a large white box that starts off as the truck the criminals have driven into the desert and quickly becomes the first building of the new city when Mahagonny is daubed with red paint on its side. Sitting on castors, it turns to give us glimpses of the town’s activities, displaying the hedonism within. By the second act it has risen into the air, leaving a raised floor that is first a boxing ring, then the deck of a ship and finally a prison and place of execution. The costumes come from an indeterminate era, and it looks like Clarke has raided the local charity shops to achieve the bold and disordered effect she wants. Special mention goes to Widow Begbick’s final outfit as she presides over the kangaroo court, looking like she has stepped straight out of a B52s video. In order to complement the set and costumes, the lighting, conceived by D.M. Wood, is mostly whites and oranges and uses portable, industrial lights to pick out the action and glare into the viewers, increasing our discomfort throughout.

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is a searing social commentary pointing out behaviours that are just as relevant today as they were back in the 1930s. We may leave the theatre feeling depressed about the way Mahagonny reflects what we see in the news about inequality, unconstrained corporate behaviour and greed, but this needs to be called out by our creative community. The tagline on the poster is “where everything has a price”, and for this lively and unrestrained opera, the price of the ticket is well worth paying to see this decadent and disturbing production.