'Mahagonny' rises, falls again

Vice and depravity are on their way to the Cutler Majestic Theatre. An entire city's worth. Or so we hope.

On Friday night, Opera Boston will open its new production of the Weill-Brecht masterpiece, "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny." A work too louche for even Weimar Berlin, it was premiered in Leipzig, Germany, in 1930, and caused near-riots with its steamy libretto and its abrasive critique of capitalist culture. Protesters scuttled one performance with stink bombs and the Nazis later banned Kurt Weill's music as "degenerate." But well before then, a New York Times critic prophesi ed: " 'Mahagonny' will not reach America. It is musical fare that is far too strong. If this work makes the rounds even of Germany, it will be due to the music of Weill and will be produced as an example of transitory period opera."

Not so transitory. True, Bertolt Brecht's purposefully discomforting, sledgehammer satire may have prevented "Mahagonny" from enjoying the popularity of the lighter "Threepenny Opera," which the two men created at nearly the same time. But "Mahagonny" is still alive and well and makes occasional appearances almost eight decades after its premiere. The Opera Boston production, in fact, opens on the heels of a new "Mahagonny" at the Los Angeles Opera. It's either a handy coincidence or a sign that companies on both coasts are taking in the contemporary zeitgeist -- and programming the apocalypse.

Weill once described the work as "a parable of modern life in which the principal character is the city itself." It is the devastating story of an imaginary place, vaguely inspired by interwar German fears and fantasies of American depravity and capitalism run rampant. Founded by a band of fugitives, the city of Mahagonny, after narrowly averting destruction by a hurricane, becomes a glutton's paradise, an island of id, where one man eats himself to death and others indulge readily in the pleasures of the flesh. Jenny Smith, the lead famously sung by Weill's wife Lotte Lenya (and later Teresa Stratas), is a tough-minded prostitute, or as the Times decorously called her in 1930: "Miss Jenny, the leader of the band of wayward sisterhood."

But when poor Jimmy MacIntyre, who has fallen for Jenny, later runs out of cash, he is carted away and put on trial. For grievous offenses light punishments are doled out, but for not being able to pay his bar tab Jimmy is sentenced to death. He is executed, the social order comes unglued, the city goes up in flames. The End.

In its day "Mahagonny" represented an entirely new breed of opera, an art form suddenly seeking a first-name basis with the masses, and Weill was a leader of the young avant-garde that was overhauling convention. In the early '20s, he studied in the master class of Ferruccio Busoni, the elder philosopher-king of musical Berlin, whose quasi-mystical visions of new worlds of sound inspired not only Weill but also Edgard Varèse. Weill wrote "Mahagonny" between 1927 and 1929, and it reflected a new confidence and sense of freedom, and more specifically, a fearless way of uniting disparate styles. The score is a dazzling catalog of everything from neo-Baroque to foxtrot, hanging loosely together, brilliantly suspended on the threshold between opera and musical theater.

How to stage a revolutionary work like this today? The Los Angeles production was directed by John Doyle, whose Broadway staging of Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd" and "Company" have won widespread acclaim, but the "Mahagonny" reviews have been decidedly mixed, with Mark Swed writing in the Los Angeles Times that the production, which drew two of its stars (Audra McDonald and Patti LuPone) from the musical theater world, suffered from a weakness for Broadway silliness. The Boston production, to be sung in English translation, stars Amy Burton, Joyce Castle, and Dan Snyder . It will be conducted by Gil Rose and directed by Sam Helfrich , whose work was most recently on view in Boston Baroque's semi-staged performance of "Don Giovanni."

A company spokeswoman described the new production's look as "decaying, contemporary, industrial," with sets designed to "look like the back of a Wal-Mart." Sounds plausible. Let's just hope Helfrich and the artistic team take the work seriously enough not to prettify or dull its razor-sharp edges. A proper "Mahagonny" should not just entertain, but provoke and even disturb with a power undiminished by the years.

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.