The prolific and influential composer Kurt Weill and writer and lyricist Bertolt Brecht teamed up in their native Germany in the 1920s, producing their best-known work, the classic and often-staged Threepenny Opera, with its signature tune, “Mack the Knife,” in 1928. By the time they created The Seven Deadly Sins in 1933, prewar Europe was on the verge of upheaval and each had fled a Germany under growing Nazi oppression. The darkly satirical performance piece, originally conceived as a ballet chanté (a sung ballet), which kicks off the College of Fine Arts 19th Fall Fringe Festival, marked their last collaboration.
The Seven Deadly Sins, with stage direction by Jim Petosa, a CFA professor and director of the School of Theatre, and musical direction by William Lumpkin, a CFA associate professor of music and artistic director of CFA’s Opera Institute, runs tonight, Friday, October 2, through Sunday, October 4, at the BU Theatre’s Lane-Comley Studio 210.
“It’s got a lot of humor and a lot of fun, and the whole thing is 50 minutes,” says Petosa. “The audience takes a wild but brief ride, and many will leave saying, ‘I didn’t know opera could do that.’”
While Sins has been staged with a full orchestra by ballet companies, including the New York City Ballet in 2011, the Fringe Festival production will be foremost an opera, offering an intimate, fourth-wall-breaking experience set to the scaled-down and reimagined instrumentation of two grand pianos and a percussionist. Set in seven American cities, each assigned its own sin (Boston’s is lust, Philadelphia’s gluttony), over a seven year period, the work chronicles the odyssey of Anna, originally portrayed by Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya, who leaves her native Louisiana to build a house for her family. But the bitingly satirical story, unfolding with the help of a four-part male chorus representing Anna’s family (the mother is sung by a bass) follows Anna and her “bad Anna” alter-ego as the pair wrestle with the dark side, from sloth to envy, until the play’s resolution. From waltzes to marches to barbershop quartets, Weill’s music reflects a kind of playful, if pointed, romp powered by Brecht’s fierce anticapitalism.
Cast members of The Seven Deadly Sins Matthew Corcoran (CFA’16) (from left), John David Nevergall (CFA’16), Joseph Hubbard (CFA’17), and Benjamin C. Taylor (CFA’16).
“These guys thought theater was a place where big ideas could be put forth, big ideas about what theater was capable of doing, so you’ve got this real cry for the proletarian working people to rise up from the shackles of oppression,” says Petosa, who compares the character to those “in the medieval rubric of the wandering character, an everywoman, who’s wandering the United States.” She leaves “the Louisiana of her mind so she can build their dream house, and is utterly degraded. Every time she exhibits a human emotion that’s virtuous, she’s excoriated.” Self-respect, for example, is the sin of pride, standing up to injustice, the sin of anger. “At the end of the piece there’s not much left of her,” he says. “It’s a stunning social critique that takes on gender struggles, the whole thing.”
For the music, Lumpkin commissioned composer John Greer, who with the blessing of the Kurt Weill Foundation, created an arrangement for dual grand pianos and a percussionist. “This will be the first time that’s being done through permission of the publisher,” Lumpkin says. The grand pianos, played by Lumpkin and Matthew Larsen, an Opera Institute lecturer in music, provide “a different color and sonority” than an orchestra would, he says.
This year’s Fringe Festival marks the first year of CFA’s musical theater concentration, created with an endowment from multiple Tony Award–winning Broadway producers Stewart Lane (CFA’73) and Bonnie Comley. The new collaboration has enriched both the School of Music and the School of Theatre, according to Petosa. “We’ve found a way to celebrate our collaborative relationship, and for me it’s one of the most rewarding things,” he says. “And with this production, though it’s still called an opera, we hope members of the BU community will see what we mean when we say musical theater—that it’s not rarified, not elite.”
“The basis of our training is to encourage the theatrical approach to opera and acting choices and building from the inside out in terms of how you develop your characterization,” Lumpkin says.
The Fringe Festival continues October 9 to 11 with Vinkensport, or The Finch Opera, composed by David T. Little, described by The New Yorker as “one of the most imaginative young composers” on today’s music scene. Sung in English and directed by Allison Voth, a CFA associate professor and Opera Institute principal coach, the opera plays off of a Belgian folk competition focused on who owns the most melodious bird in the town. The seemingly innocent competition ultimately reveals the competitors’ struggles with deception, loneliness, and love.
Last on the festival program is Enda Walsh’s play Delirium, an inventive reinterpretation of Dostoyevsky’s classic novel The Brothers Karamazov. Directed by MFA candidate Jonathan Solari (CFA’16), the updated tale, which runs October 22 to 25, employs puppetry, karaoke, and other surprises. “From the opening moments, when chairs are flung around the family living room in slow motion, it is clear that this family are uniquely unhappy in a manner of which Tolstoy would entirely approve,” wrote a Guardian critic of a 2008 London production.
The BU Fall Fringe Festival is an annual collaboration of the College of Fine Arts School of Music, Opera Institute, and School of Theatre. The festival’s mission is to produce new or rarely performed significant works in the opera and theater repertoire, bringing performances and audiences together in unique theatrical settings.
All CFA Fringe Festival productions are performed at the BU Theatre’s Lane-Comley Studio 210, 264 Huntington Ave., Boston. Performance dates and times are as follows: The Seven Deadly Sins: Friday, October 2, at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, October 3, at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Sunday, October 4, at 2 p.m. Vinkensport, or The Finch Opera: Friday, October 9, at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, October 10, at 2 and 7:30 p.m.; and Sunday, October 11, at 2 p.m. Delirium: Thursday, October 22, at 7:30 p.m., Friday, October 23, at 7:30 p.m., Saturday October 24, at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Sunday, October 25, at 2 p.m. Tickets are $7 general admission, $3.50 with CFA membership, free with BU ID at the door on the day of the performance, subject to availability. Buy tickets here or call 617-933-8600. Take the MBTA Green Line E trolley to Symphony or the Orange Line to Mass Avenue.