Miller’s Urban Renewal of ‘Mahagonny’

It’s all snickers and giggles on the set of the Music Center Opera’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.” After all, director Jonathan Miller is in charge.

It doesn’t matter that the subject at hand is a sardonic diatribe against capitalism and its manifold corruptions, namely the Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht “Mahagonny.” But in the controversial British director’s presence--he gave us in 1988 a “Mikado” full of Marx Brothers shtick--it’s difficult to think of anything as really serious business.

In fact, when the opera opens Sunday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion--as the Music Center Opera’s second production of the season--Miller, 55, will have dispensed altogether with what he calls “Brechtian heavy-handedness,” replacing it with the spirit of Kafka’s “Amerika,” Charlie Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush” and other innocently inaccurate images of the Wild West that were peculiar to European intellectuals.

He will be faithful, however, to the very letter of the libretto--given in Michael Feingold’s scatological English translation--for Miller subscribes to a speech-act theory that holds fidelity to text and score as a cardinal rule.

“At the same time,” he says, “we must realize that the so-called theater of alienation which Brecht made so much of seems naive now. You can tell an audience that they’re in the presence of the theatrical to the point where they become nauseated by the news.

“ ‘Mahagonny’ is a back (outdated) number now,” he says, referring to its Nazi topicalism, its 1930 premiere in Leipzig with Weimar Germany on the rise and Brown Shirts inciting an audience riot. “So we’re not going to produce a work that spondles along from episode to episode with instructional placards and a curtain whisking across stage every 30 seconds to denote a new scene. Enough.

“Brecht was a great bully and all those Marxist ironies he proposed are conventional wisdom by now--anyone who is still unfamiliar with them has to be brain-damaged. It sounds like I’m putting him down but he was so plunkingly literal that I cannot think of him as a man of sophisticated and subtle thought.”

To a certain extent Miller is not alone. Weill, who blended jazzy cabaret elements into his acidic score, opposed Brecht’s Marxist agitprop and wanted a flowing opera with universal themes, according to Weill’s biographer Ronald Sanders. Here in Los Angeles the director will oblige the composer by using Hollywood as a metaphor--including designer Robert Isreal’s facades of Westerns. “It’s world of illusion and exploitation, all the things that Brecht talks about but without having to be beaten over the head and told about them every time.”

Instead of worrying about Nazis and Communists, he explains, the focus will be on generalized greed and gullibility, appetite and idealism. As long as Brown Shirts are not invading the rehearsal room, he argues, they cannot become a salient issue:

“Now we have other salient issues, like, are we going to (foul) up our planet by poisoning it? And quite apart from that anyone who thinks we can reform society by way of stage performances really needs to have his head examined. You change society by sitting in sweaty, boring committee rooms and by fighting people.”

His humanist conscience notwithstanding, Miller admits to having been seduced by the theater--thus his desire “to beguile audiences, not instruct them.” To that end he looks for a cinematic fluency of action. And, certainly, for a depth of characterization.

Cast members call his style “direction by committee.” After giving them big doses of atmosphere--they read “Amerika,” watched “The Gold Rush” to get a picture of the Alaskan gold prospectors, looked at photos of the old West--he expects their contributions.

Marvellee Cariaga, as the money-hungry Widow Begbick, cherishes the work with Miller--”he’s infectious”--and admires him “for not being a dictator, which many directors are, and letting us bring in our own ideas.”

Her brainstorm, likening the hurricane scene to the movie “Key Largo” was one he enlisted to get “the heavy, humid, hot, helpless feeling we all had before the storm,” says Louis Lebherz, who sings Alaska Wolf Joe, a lumberjack in this mythic city of pleasure where the only crime is not having money.

“Jonathan helped me out with a verbal image,” Lebherz says. “He talked about the wooden cobwebbed cog that began to turn in my brain and how everything developed from that.”

At a critical moment--when the disillusioned hero Jimmy tries to leave Mahagonny--Lebherz says that Joe, “in his creakiest, slowest, most innocently imploring voice asks: ‘Don’tcha got gin and cheap whiskey?’ ”

Alaska Wolf Joe, as Lebherz decribes him, becomes a faithful St. Bernard, a Lenny from “Of Mice and Men.” It’s such dramatic nuances that make all the difference to him.

Others agree that atmosphere is the key to this “Mahagonny.” Anna Steiger, who makes her American debut here as Jenny, thinks “it’s being done as a lark, perhaps not what people expect. They’ll either be disappointed or relieved. Rather than a thing of dark moralizing it should come across as a good show,” says the daughter of Claire Bloom and Rod Steiger.

Miller concurs. “Categories are not helpful,” he asserts. “When Sam Johnson became impatient with the query of whether Shakespeare’s works were properly tragedies or comedies he insisted: ‘neither or both.’ They reflect that character of our sublunary life in which the mourner on the way to the grave meets the reveler on the way to the bottle and where the malice of one is undone by the frolic of another.

“When you’re actually carpenters in this trade, workmen in it, the daily business of making sure you don’t get splinters in your hand determines what you do.

“As for all the flinty Marxists who came here--Brecht included--they were infinitely seduceable. Most of those who flee Eastern Europe become the most spectacular consumers. I just returned from Vilna (Lithuania) and after visiting your supermarkets and exulting in the strange sort of consumer festivity that draws me to Vons at 4 a.m. to buy pasta salad I can tell you this:

“All we would have to do to make ‘Star Wars’ irrelevant is show Vons to the people of Vilna.”