Barrie Kosky Is the Director New York Has Been Waiting For

New York Times

18-02-2025

When 'The Threepenny Opera' returns to New York this spring, for an all-too-brief visit to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it will be notable for a few reasons.
For one, it will be a homecoming. Although 'Threepenny' was born in Berlin, an artifact of Weimar-era culture, with music by Kurt Weill and text by Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, it had a midcentury resurgence on the level of a pop-culture phenomenon when it was revived Off Broadway in 1954.
And it will be performed by the Berliner Ensemble, which was founded by Brecht and still operates out of the theater where 'Threepenny' had its premiere in 1928. The group is a trustworthy custodian of a work that is often mishandled today, especially in recent New York productions.
But what is most important about this run of 'Threepenny,' presented by BAM and St. Ann's Warehouse April 3 through 6, is that it will be the first real opportunity for New York audiences to see the work of the director Barrie Kosky.
Though Kosky, 58, graced local playbills once before, when his production of 'The Magic Flute,' a collaboration with the company 1927, came to the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2019, 'Threepenny' will be the first show that is purely his own. Which should come as a shock, since Kosky is one of the busiest and most brilliant, not to mention entertaining, directors working in Europe today.
He is a director accomplished in theater and opera. His work could fit easily on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera, with a balance of intelligence and showmanship that would breathe new life into both. This 'Threepenny' will be an opportunity for him to win over New York audiences. Will impresarios be watching?
Born in Australia, Kosky has described himself as a 'gay, Jewish kangaroo.' His grandparents were European transplants who came from Budapest and the shtetls of Belarus. His grandmother from Hungary instilled in him a love of operetta, he wrote in his book ''Und Vorhang auf, Hallo!,'' or ''And Curtain Up, Hello!'' He ended up developing a passion for classical music, operas and musicals without much regard for genre or hierarchy.
To him, 'The Magic Flute' was the 'mother ship of the musical.' Mahler's symphonies were art, and so was 'The Simpsons.' As he grew up, and began to perform in and then direct theater, his artistry was informed, he likes to say, by two other cultural artifacts: Kafka's writing and 'The Muppets.'
They weren't so different, at least in his mind. Several Kafka stories are about talking animals, and there is something Kafkaesque in Kermit's never-ending struggle to keep his show going. Both, Kosky wrote in his memoir, are reminiscent of Yiddish theater; Fozzie Bear is even a kind of sad Jewish clown. He thought of 'The Muppets' as 'a queer space' in which Miss Piggy was the reigning drag queen, flirting with Rudolf Nureyev in a steam room and tormenting Kermit, a gay 'Max Reinhardt meets Charlie Chaplin.'
It's sensational for Kosky to say that his aesthetic is Kafka and 'The Muppets,' but if you watch his productions with that in mind, it's accurate. There is hardly a trace of realism in his shows, which tend to unfold throughout dreamscapes. A room may not have a wall; comedy may become irrationally nightmarish; life may just be an endless vaudeville.
Kosky's career bloomed in Australia before flourishing in Europe, with tenures running the Schauspielhaus in Vienna and the Komische Oper in Berlin. (He has also had champions in the United States. The Met had planned to import his production of Prokofiev's 'The Fiery Angel' in 2020. It was canceled because of the pandemic, with no rescheduling in sight. Upstate, however, he is developing a new work with the Fisher Center at Bard.) Throughout his projects you sense someone, like Kermit, determined to put on a good show. That is why even his weaker productions still function well as theater.
If anything, that is the thread through his stagings. Some are maximalist and some are minimalist, but all are theatrical, which isn't always the case with his peers in Europe. And while there are visual hallmarks to a Kosky show, like bold colors, his work is more recognizable for its sensibility: Audience members can count on virtually airtight logic, no matter how zany his work may appear, and they can expect performers to behave with the organic freedom that comes from thorough, detail-obsessed rehearsals.
Like the best of directors, Kosky also knows that different titles call for different looks and dramatic gestures. In his book he describes 'Tosca' as an opera that calls for 'thick oil paint and a broad brush,' whereas something by Mozart or Janacek requires 'a fine brush.' One of the broadest canvases in the repertoire is Wagner's 'Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,' which Kosky staged at the Bayreuth Festival in 2017. The production encapsulated his bravery, wit and charm.
'Meistersinger' contains over four and a half hours of music, with pitfalls throughout: comedy, romance, antisemitic tropes and, in the final minutes, a darkly nationalistic turn. Even more difficult is staging it at Bayreuth, which was founded by Wagner and comes with the baggage of complicated history, not least as a favorite opera destination of Hitler's.
Kosky addressed all that head-on. He set the first act inside a replica of Wahnfried, Wagner's home, where the composer was known to play and sing through his opera scores. Kosky recreated one of those gatherings, with 'Meistersinger' characters represented by real, historical people like Cosima Wagner and her father, Franz Liszt. He even included Wagner's Newfoundland dogs.
At first, the set design was unusually realistic for Kosky. But at the end of Act One, the walls were pulled up to reveal the comparatively chilly courtroom interior of the Nuremberg trials. In Wagner's libretto, the second act closes with a comedic riot sparked by a misunderstanding and an attack on the character Beckmesser, a pedantic villain coded as a kind of Jewish outsider. There was humor in Kosky's staging, but it was replaced by horror at what suddenly started to look like a pogrom.
It felt as if everyone in the theater was holding their breath as an enormous antisemitic caricature based on 'The Eternal Jew' inflated onstage like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade float. As it deflated and the curtain closed, the audience was left with a provocation for the hourlong intermission that followed.
For the nationalistic ending, Kosky had the character Hans Sachs deliver his monologue about 'holy German art' as if testifying at Nuremberg, shaking his fists with conviction as the courtroom emptied and he was left alone while a Fellini-esque orchestra in black tie rolled onstage to play the jubilant finale. Was it delusion or triumph? The audience was left to decide, a stand-in for the jury.
Like the opera, Kosky's staging was hardly simple. But it was clear, funny yet terrifying, delightful and then haunting.
He has achieved similar effects with starker images. In his production of Janacek's 'Kat'a Kabanova' at the Salzburg Festival in 2022, the opera's tragedy unfolded both on a bare stage and before hundreds of mannequins with their backs turned on the action. The action of his 'Fiddler on the Roof,' which originated at the Komische Oper but has traveled to Lyric Opera of Chicago, springs from a stack of wardrobes and wooden furniture.
'Fiddler' is far from the only musical that Kosky has staged at the Komische Oper, a one-stop shop in Berlin for opera, operetta and musical theater. During his time there, which ended in 2022 with a delirious, three-hour show called 'Barrie Kosky's All-Singing, All-Dancing Yiddish Revue,' he revolutionized the company's repertoire and unearthed operettas by composers like Paul Abraham, Oscar Straus and Emmerich Kalman.
Kosky continues to direct at the Komische Oper, and he is midway through a plan to stage five musicals there. He began with 'La Cage aux Folles,' in a gayer, grander treatment than it ever got on Broadway, and continued with 'Chicago,' free of Fosse clichés and heavy on razzle-dazzle. Last fall he directed 'Sweeney Todd,' which at first appeared to take place in a Victorian toy theater before unfolding against images of urban decay, including in Thatcher-era London. All these were better than their most recent counterparts in New York.
Directing 'Threepenny,' at the storied Berliner Ensemble in 2021, had similar pressures to the 'Meistersinger' job at Bayreuth. He was replacing the chilly, unmusical production by Robert Wilson, and 'Threepenny,' a beloved but imperfect work, is difficult. Too often, modern productions are bogged down by humorlessness and affected sleaze, as if it were 'Cabaret.'
But 'Threepenny' is filthily hilarious and dangerously entertaining, daring audiences to be seduced by Weill's earworm melodies before stinging them with the barbs of Brecht and Hauptmann's script. Kosky, more than most directors, is sensitive to its polyphonic structure in his staging, which moves around, repeats and trims material throughout to make the show move briskly and with a light hand, allowing the subtext its slithering grace.
For people who were brought up on Brecht as a purveyor of deliberatively blunt theater, Kosky's approach may seem sacrilegious. But in its affability, its showmanship, his 'Threepenny' works the unsettling magic it should. It's not until the lights come up, and you begin to relax your smile, that you realize you were just cheering for a narcissistic murderer by the name of Mack the Knife.