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NEW YORK -- Brecht, where is thy sting?
The 1989 Broadway production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's musical masterpiece The Threepenny Opera had it, literally, with a capital S. Sting's performance as that ne'er-do-well Macheath wasn't embraced by all critics. But I'll wager the biggest naysayers would recall the rock star's run fondly if asked to compare it with the version that just landed, with a thud, at Studio 54.
The Roundabout Theatre Company's staging of Threepenny (* 1/2 out of four), which opened Thursday, looks intriguing on paper. Director Scott Elliott has shown his flair for socially charged material, and Alan Cumming exuded a witty sensuality and menace in Roundabout's Cabaret that would seem to bode well for Macheath.
There's even a fresh pair of pop singers: rebellious troubadour Nellie McKay as rebellious ingenue Polly Peachum, and Cyndi Lauper as Jenny, Mack's not-quite-true love.
When stirred together, though, the ingredients add up to a mess. Elliott and translator Wallace Shawn try really hard to make Brecht's ferocious material newly subversive, but their four-letter words and gender-bending touches merely seem gratuitous and silly.
Cumming is neither as threatening nor as thrilling as he was on his romp through Weimar Berlin. He's not particularly androgynous, either, though he does canoodle with a few guys -- among them Brian Charles Rooney, who for added shock value is cast as Lucy Brown. Rooney's screeching performance, like a lot of bad camp, is funny for about 20 seconds.
McKay fares better at first, though her mock-bright demureness grows tedious. By the end of the first act, she sounds as if she's reciting fiction for National Public Radio. Lauper delivers her usual strong voice and New Yawk accent, which hardly seems out of place here, since each character seems to come from a different city. I counted four different dialects in the Peachum household alone, two be- longing to Ana Gasteyer's overwrought Mrs. Peachum.
The show's brightest spot is Jim Dale's nimble Mr. Peachum. Otherwise, this Threepenny is a pretty dull piece of change.
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