All Is Human

By T.E. Kalem

THE BEGGAR'S OPERA by JOHN GAY

Here they all are, the rogues, doxies, gin swillers, pickpockets and highwaymen of 18th century London, singing, swaggering and skylarking their way across the stage like an animated Hogarth engraving. "All is human," one of the characters says, and it is the swirling tide of recognizable humanity that has kept this play-with-music so buoyantly alive for almost 250 years.

In The Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht refined the characters that Gay created, while Kurt Weill provided a tart and tangy score that is one of the marvels of the musical theater. The juice of art and life, however, flows richly enough through the original Beggar's Opera. The dominant motif--Gay's as well as Brecht's--is that money is thicker than blood. By now, the characters are classic, and they all live up to their names: Peachum (Gordon Cornell), the informer and fence; Lockit (Ralston Hill), the venal jailer of Newgate; and MacHeath (Timothy Jerome), the saucy highwayman who can down a wench as quickly as a cup of sack. As two of the ladies of his choice, Polly Peachum (Kathleen Widdoes) and Lucy Lockit (Marilyn Sokol) are erotic sprites.

This is an amusing, thoroughly relaxing evening at Manhattan's McAlpin Rooftop Theater. Special praise should go to the venturesome Chelsea Theater Center, which originated this production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music along with Jean Genet's The Screens, recent winner of the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best foreign play of the year.

--T.E. Kalem

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