Appropos of the Shark . . .
O.k., it's a little strange to go to the theatre when you're unemployed, but the tickets were cheap and we hadn't been out much and it was the Belvoir Theatre, whose Company B are one of the most respected theatrical troupes going, and I've never actually seen the Three Penny Opera, even though I have heard a lot of Kurt Weil in my life, including, but not limited to, the Bobby Darin rendering of "Mack the Knife." It was a good enough production, although in the end I'd have preferred if they'd avoided the common error of contemporizing the content, which was done without a full effort at relocating from Soho (London) to King's Cross (Sydney), despite the use of Australian colloquialism. This is the same group who worked on the theatrical adaptation of Cloudstreet, the celebrated epic novel by Tim Winton set in post WWII Perth, which M. and I saw at the Brooklyn Academy when their Next Wave festival featured a lot of Australiana. That was a major piece of theatre; this was just o.k. But now I know the story and have a better sense of the Brecht/Weil collaboration.