by Gail M. Burns
In Berlin, Germany, in 1928 The Threepenny Opera was a huge and lucrative hit for Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, and Brecht’s secretary Elisabeth Hauptmann, who fought hard over the decades to have her translation of John Gay’s 1728 The Beggar’s Opera and other work on the book publicly acknowledged. Although Brecht and Weill immediately moved on to other, what they considered more serious, work, their producer was eager for another big money maker, and so Brecht farmed out the script for Happy End to Hauptmann and the piece was hastily tossed together and opened within a year of Threepenny. It was not the hoped-for hit, in fact it closed after seven performances, never to be seen again until 1958, by which time Brecht and Weill were both dead (Hauptmann lived until 1973 but she and Brecht had both repudiated the script.)
The sole winner in the Happy End adventure was Weill (pronounced Vile, not Wheel or While) whose music has rightly endured. Some consider this his best score for the musical theatre.
What the Glimmerglass Festival, in collaboration with Opera Saratoga, the Seagle Festival, and Finger Lakes Opera, are currently touring as Happy End is a 90 minute concert version. These are opera companies, the cast is made up of exciting young opera talent, and the songs are sung in the operatic style, in English, using Michael Feingold’s excellent English lyrics. There are no supertitles.
The problem is that Happy End is not an opera, it’s a piece of popular musical theatre. I use “popular” in the sense of “for the people”. While Brecht’s lyrics espouse a lot of political and socioeconomic ideology, he was using the popular idiom of musical theatre to peddle it. People are much more likely to remember ideology when it’s set to music.
You don’t go to see the opera, you go to hear it. Plot is inconsequential and often ludicrous. I once asked an opera loving friend for a synopsis of the plot of a piece, and he rolled his eyes and said, “Gail, it’s opera.” I’ve seen The Magic Flute three times, each time with a different expert friend (yes, one was a Mason) and I still can’t tell you the plot. It literally doesn’t matter.
In musical theatre, the plot matters, and that is exactly what you won’t get from this concert, despite herculean efforts from director Mary Birnbaum and the cast. Their fate was sealed by Kelley Rurke’s adaptation and the decision to preserve the music over the story.
Not that the story matters any more than it matters that Harold Hill wins the heart of Marion the Librarian, but in both cases the songs exist to expand and progress the plot, inconsequential as it may be, and for the few hours you are in the theatre you are invested in those characters and that story and long for the promised Happy End.
Grand opera is usually sung in the language in which it was first written and therefore opera audiences are used to not understanding the words. Opera companies use extensive program notes and supertitles to compensat, but you can have a wonderful experience at the opera without ever understanding the story.
Since this is a tour and the company has to cope with different performance spaces every show, it would be grand to hand that pesky plot stuff over to program notes (please do read the ones provided, they’re helpful) and supertitles (I confess I don’t know how tricky it is to tour with supertitles, or even what that entails) and just sing.
In 1972 Robert Brustein commissioned Feingold to translate Happy End (the title is in English but the book and lyrics are in German) for his Yale Repertory Company, by which he meant “translate Brecht’s lyrics and make up a new book” which is exactly what Feingold did. He created his own take on the basic plot, translated Brecht’s lyrics faithfully, and preserved Weill’s fabulous score, but the sensibility is decidedly Watergate, not Weimar Republic. That is what I saw a production of in 1977. I was 20 years old and it had a great impact on me.
(The full script of Feingold’s translation is available here.)
So I entered the Clark Art Institute auditorium as one of the few people in the world to have seen a full production of Happy End, but that experience was 49 years ago. I had an idea of what I would see, and a longing for what I could see, but no real memory of the plot per se. Gangsters versus the Salvation Army (no relation to Guys and Dolls, the source material by Damon Runyon hadn’t been published yet). There was a love story. And it made me laugh. That’s what I remembered.
It wasn’t until the final loopy denouement that I laughed out loud. It was like suddenly recognizing an old friend. There it was! There was the funny show I remembered, the one I longed to see again. I wanted to run up on stage and grab that talented cast and say, “Once more from the top, and this time make it FUN!”
I have to say that they strove really, really hard for that fun. Birnbaum and her cast know how silly this piece is. But the abbreviated book strips all that away, and the operatic singing style takes the show that one step further away from audience accessibility. Weill is quoted in the program as saying, “Opera was founded as an aristocratic form of art…if the framework of opera is unable to withstand the impact of the age, then this framework must be destroyed…” Production by four opera companies forces that framework awkwardly back on to the newly liberated art form.
I hold Ana Karneža separate from this criticism, because she actually does understand how Weill is meant to be presented. She is the Kurt Weill/Lotte Lenya Artist, is a prizewinner of the 2024 Lotte Lenya Competition, and appears with the support of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music. I loved when she lounged on the piano and sang “The Bilbao Song” – Kurt Weill music is excellent fodder for cabaret artists who sing in smoke filled bars in the wee hours of the morning…you get the picture.
I will not call Karneža disabled because she is clearly very able indeed, but her appearance is unique and audiences are so unused to seeing differently-abled people given agency and presence on stage that it took me time to realize that she was playing the larger than life Bad Guy of the piece, The Fly.
I had remembered The Fly being given a big, splashy entrance, because the concept of The Godfather being a Godmother, was radical in 1929, in 1977, and is still a surprising thought today. The other women in Happy End are presented in stereotypical feminine roles, but The Fly breaks them all, just as casting Karneža does, but I still needed everyone to turn and gasp “The Fly!!!” when she first entered. If you only have 90 minutes you have to establish characters and their relationships quickly.
In an odd choice, they used the original Act III finale, “Hosanna Rockefeller”, as the opening number here. It has little connection to the rest of show and has aged less gracefully than the rest of the score. It helps establish tone rather than place or character.
So the beginning was weak. It was hard to decipher who was playing who and what their relationships were. Brecht’s Epic Theatre style employed the use of signage to remind the spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself, so the use of such techniques would have been artistically appropriate and very helpful.
The confusion mounts as more characters enter the scene. Some costuming is used, but it could be improved to help establish character. I didn’t recognize the Salvation Army group at their first entrance because they weren’t in uniform, not that I expected authentic 1929 Salvation Army gear, but I expected the uniform appearance that uniforms give a group.
Christina Taylor Price is Lieutenant Lillian Holliday aka Hallelujah Lil, the Salvation army worker with “modern” ideas for saving sinners, who bravely enters Bill’s Beer Hall and attempts to reform Billy Cracker (Gregory Feldmann), a gangster in The Fly’s mob. Price is a Juilliard graduate, as are many in the cast, whose career in opera and musical theatre seems to be off to a strong start. Her rendition of “Surabaya Johnny, sung in a less operatic voice, was heartbreaking. Alas, Feldmann’s performance, behind his warm baritone and handsome features, is fairly wooden.
Jason Zacher and William Raskin played the additional members of The Fly’s gang and provided much of the comic relief. Raskin was particularly manic and energetic as he bounced about the stage, a mop of curly hair accentuating his antics. Sadly, this pair did not succeed in making the entire show funny, but they definitely provided some lighter moments and made it clear that the company understood the spirit of the piece.
Lauren Torrey and Bradley Bickhardt also found some fun as Salvation Army members, under the ultra conservative thumb of their Major (Lisa Marie Rogali).
The final member of the cast is Jonathan Pierce Rhodes as the Governor, who is killed off early. He gets to do some nifty physical comedy and brings the show home at the end (which is a good trick when you’re dead.)
Rob Ainsley is the pianist, music director, Foley artist, and plays The Inspector. His accompaniment is buoyant and accomplished, but I missed the fascinating instrumentation of Weill’s work as played by a larger group of musicians.
I saw the very first public performance on the tour, and so I hope mentioning some things that can easily be fixed, such as adding some Epic Theatre signage or lengthier program notes, may provide a less problematic experience for future crowds, but it is not the job of the theatre critic to “fix” the show. It is what it is and the entire effort is to be applauded. Happy End will tour to six destinations in New York state before ending up at Glimmerglass in July. (New York City dates in the autumn will be announced soon). With the exception of Utica and Rochester, all the other locations are close enough to the Berkshire on Stage coverage area to be easily accessible and I encourage you to attend. Bringing opera to the people is always a grand plan.
Happy End, book by Elisabeth Hauptmann (under the pseudonym “Dorothy Lane”), music and lyrics by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, American adaptation by Michael Feingold,
concert version by Kelley Rourke, music director Rob Ainsley, directed by Mary Birnbaum. CAST: Christine Taylor Price as Lieutenant Lillian Holliday aka Hallelujah Lil, Gregory Feldmann as Billy Cracker, Ana Karneža as The Fly, Lisa Marie Rogali as the Major, Jonathan Pierce Rhodes as the Governor, Brad Bickhardt as Hannibal, Jason Zacher as Benny, William Raskin as Jimmy, Lauren Torrey as Maryjane, and Rob Ainsley as Joe/The Inspector. CREATIVE TEAM: Set designer Tobin Ost, technical director Joel Morain, properties manager Seth Black, costume designer Márion Talán de la Rosa, assistant costume designer Adeline Santello, costume director Lynne Hinman, hair & make-up consultant Sarah Cimino, tour manager Cara Consilvio, touring stage manager Kathleen Stakenas, tour support Rebecca Gill and Sean Sansevere.
2026 Happy End Tour Schedule
May 9 | 3:00 PM — Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA
May 10 | 3:00 PM — Munson, Utica, NY
May 16 | 7:30 PM — Seagle Festival, Tannery Pond Center, North Creek, NY
May 17 | 3:00 PM — Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, Troy, NY
May 28 & 30 | 7:00 PM — Opera Saratoga, Universal Preservation Hall, Saratoga Springs, NY
May 29 | 8:00 PM — Hudson Hall, Hudson, NY
July 23 | 7:00 PM — Finger Lakes Opera, Panara Theater at Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY
July 28 & 31 | 4:30 PM — The Glimmerglass Festival, Pavilion, Cooperstown, NY
Additional New York City dates for the fall of 2026 will be announced at a later date.