Old Macheath is back, this time flashing his pearly whites as a thief in 1850s New York City in an updated version of John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch’s 1728 classic The Beggar’s Opera (perhaps best known for Bertolt Brecht, Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill’s 1928 adaptation, The Threepenny Opera, with its now-standard signature ballad “Mack the Knife”). The Counterfeit Opera, which opened at the Little Island’s outdoor amphitheater near the Meatpacking District, stars Damon Daunno as the lecherous rogue Macheath, an Irish immigrant who juggles multiple women (more than one of whom claims him as her husband) while leading a crew of firefighters that earns good money for their services and sometimes starts the blaze themselves just to insure a steady income.
There’s a timeless appeal to lower-class strivers, or course, and the show’s opening moments underscore this point: The full ensemble piles out of an onstage semi-trailer with pilfered costumes and props (“Property of the Metropolitan Opera”), and a call to arms for the have-nots. “Only the wealthy can afford Broadway. Or Netflix without ads,” one says, while another adds, “Even if you’re well-off, we invite you to take our side tonight.”
But the decision to then set the bulk of the show back in the era of Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York blunts much of the satirical edge to material that still has the power to draw out the hypocrisies and contradictions of people living on both sides of the economic fence. Despite the contemporary parallels that writer-lyricist Kate Tarker draws in her story, this remains the stuff of the past.
“You can’t put ketchup on a Catholic,” Ann Harada’s Mrs. Peachum complains in a hilarious early song when learned that her pretty young daughter, Polly (Dorcas Leung) has eloped with the decidedly Irish Macheath — a union that threatens her and her husband (Vin Knight) and their lucrative business fencing stolen goods. They draft the eminently bribeable local jailer, Lockit (a scene-stealing Sola Fadiran), to arrest Macheath — and he goes into a hiding while reconnecting with a harem’s worth of exes, including Lockit’s daughter, the strong-voiced Zenzi Williams, and a spitfire of a prostitute named Jenny Diver (Lauren Patten), who gets the score’s strongest ballad/arias and would blow the roof of the place but for the fact that it’s an open-air venue.
Daunno, who memorably reinvented Curly in the stripped-down 2019 revival of Oklahoma!, has a harder time struggling through his songs, solos that frequently demand rapid shifts from baritone chest voice to full-belt falsetto and back again. Dan Schlosberg’s score is a demanding one vocally, and it also plunders both classical and musical theater influences like the band of thieves who opened the show. (You can hear snatches of everything from The Fantasticks to Weill to punk rock.) Pepusch’s original score added satirical new lyrics to folk songs, popular ballads, and snatches of Italian operas familiar to the audience at the tine — like an 18th-century version of Gerard Alessandrini’s Forbidden Broadway. But here there’s no strong melodic or stylistic line to bring the individual numbers together — or to allow any one tune to linger in your memory afterward. Many tunes end anticlimactically, depriving the audience the chance to recognize the end, or to applaud. Director Dustin Wills’s direction veers from campy to confounding; too often he places book scenes far upstage, behind Lisa Laratta’s scaffold-like scenic design.
While The Counterfeit Opera boasts many pleasures, including the unspoken irony of satirizing the wealth disparity in a venue funded by billionaire mogul Barry Diller, it often feels like a work in progress that could have benefited from some additional workshopping. (According to the New York Times, the show has had a rushed six-month development process.) Certainly, I can see no rationale for the new conclusion, a dramatic departure from both of the previous versions of the story that comes out of nowhere and ends the show on a jarring note.
THE COUNTERFEIT OPERA
Little Island, Off Broadway
Running time: 110 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through June 15 for $25
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