Current events underscore works

Opera double bill warmly celebrates those who raise voices in protest

by Tim Smith, Sun Music Critic

Tom McNichols and Nick Hay in the opening scene of Mahagonny

The issue of political dissent never loses its timeliness. Just now, with voices of opposition to all sorts of governments around the world getting louder by the day, that issue is particularly pertinent. It provides an extra degree of power to Peabody Chamber Opera’s exceptional double bill at the Theatre Project — Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel and Udo Zimmermann’s White Rose.

Weill’s short, biting piece of cabaret-style entertainment from 1927 took effective pot-shots at the unsettled post-Wor1d War I scene in Germany and beyond, a time when “there is no peace in us, and no compassion, and there is nothing a man can depend upon.” Illusion and delusion are everywhere.

The remarkable heroics of two siblings in Nazi Germany, Sophie and Hans Scholl, guillotined for passing out anti-Reich leaflets, inspired Zimmermann’s 75-minute, stream-of-consciousness drama from 1985. The composer finds in their short-lived struggle the essence of the battle between morality and evil and presents it in an alternately bracing and achingly beautiful expressionistic style.

Beth Stewart and
Tom McNichols in scene 4 of Mahagonny

Roger Brunyate has designed and directed a provocative staging of these two works, with minimal props and maximum intensity.

On Friday night, Arsenia Soto (Sophie) and Joseph Cole Regan (Hans) thoroughly inhabited their roles; their acting had a disarming naturalness. They both negotiated the complex score with aplomb; Regan’s voice had an especially warm, affecting tone. Conductor JoAnn Kulesza led a taut, assured account of the score and had the orchestra responding firmly.

The six-member cast of Mahagonny Songspiel caught the spicy flavor of the piece, vocally and theatrically. Mariatana Salerno and Beth Stewart delivered the intoxicating Alabama Song with considerable flair. Kulesza’s conducting was again admirable; so was the instrumental contribution.

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Production photographs by Jesse Hellman