Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny review – big and brash staging for Brecht and Weill’s whisky-soaked dystopia
Jamie Manton’s new production for English National Opera is sparky and substantial. Danielle de Niese brings star quality to tarty Jenny, and the chorus are consistently superb
What’s the worst crime in Mahagonny, the spider-web city built by three cons in order to extract a living out of sucker tourists? Not having any cash. ENO knows all too well how that particular predicament feels. Somehow, though, Jamie Manton’s new production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera manages to make a virtue of thriftiness, yet still feels substantial.
For a start, it’s big. In Brechtian style, the whole breadth and depth of the Coliseum stage is open: it feels almost as if this should be an immersive production, with the audience up there in the performers’ midst. Milla Clarke’s set, centred on a huge container, reuses elements that ENO regulars will recognise from productions long past, and the costumes look like the spoils from a charity-shop sweep – which fits the trashy aesthetic.
And it’s uneven – but then, so is the opera itself. There are longueurs in this story of exploitation and greed, set in a US desert dystopia. It first reached the stage in Berlin in 1930, and you might say that the feeling in the world now is not so very different, but Manton doesn’t give us obvious parallels or references to Trump and Vance. The joke is more on us. Those sucker tourists, initially in office wear, making their first appearance like extra audience members, lined up in the aisles and stood in the boxes.
There are sparky touches, including the human megaphone that arrives to announce each scene, looking like a white-clad alien wearing the kind of conical collar your cat gets wrangled into after an operation. A tap-dancing hurricane limbers up passive-aggressively before threatening the townspeople with his belligerent fancy footwork.
Lizzi Gee’s choreography is also on show in some neat numbers involving treadmills as the characters trudge towards Mahagonny – including the Alabama Song, made famous outside the opera house by David Bowie and the Doors, here delivered by Danielle de Niese. Benefiting more than most from the subtle amplification, she brings star quality to Jenny, the tart with less of a heart than you initially think. Simon O’Neill makes all Jimmy MacIntyre’s lines sound like Wagner, and Elgan Llŷr Thomas sings elegantly as Jack, even as he’s eating himself to death. Rosie Aldridge is a formidable Widow Begbick, cutting the whisky with liquid siphoned off from the tank next to the urinal. Jeremy Sams’ English translation is, characteristically, razor-sharp.
In his first appearance as ENO’s music director designate – he takes up the post next year – André de Ridder keeps the orchestra energised, but the stars are the chorus, onstage most of the time, who nail Weill’s tricky ensemble writing with a conviction that few opera company choruses worldwide could match. They deserve greater job security than they currently have.