HAPPY END
One of the most valuable functions that a nonprofit, institutionally based theater can perform is the revival and reinvestigation of neglected, historically interesting works. The Court Theatre’s staging of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1929 musical Happy End, produced in conjunction with the University of Chicago’s New Music Ensemble, is just such a venture. But sometimes a neglected work is neglected for good reason: in the case of Happy End, the reason is an almost arrogantly slipshod script.
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From the beginning, Happy End was a problem show. Brecht and Weill embarked on it as a follow-up to their enormously successful The Threepenny Opera of 1928. Like Threepenny, Happy End was to be a witty amalgam of sex, violence, and socially conscious sarcasm. But during the writing period, Brecht came under other, sometimes conflicting influences. For one thing, he married his lover, the actress Helene Weigel, and hurriedly rewrote the script to give her a juicier role, reassigning to her lines originally written for the hero. (As a result, the actor playing the hero walked out during rehearsals and had to be replaced.) More seriously, Brecht was moving into the most passionate–and most dogmatic–phase of his involvement with communism, and he was working on other, more ideological projects at the same time as he was supposed to be concocting the commercial Happy End. The result was a tempestuous and difficult production process–during one rehearsal, an actor screamed at Brecht “You were supposed to write a play, not come here and shit on the stage!”–and finally, a work that satisfied neither audiences nor critics nor the author himself. Brecht sought to disown the work by officially attributing it to one “Dorothy Lane”; unofficially, Brecht said the script was adapted by his longtime collaborator, Elisabeth Hauptmann, from a short story by American writer Dorothy Lane that had appeared in the American magazine J and L Weekly. The whole thing was a hoax–there’s no evidence that Lane, her story, or the magazine ever existed–but Hauptmann was willing to take the rap; only after Brecht’s death did she acknowledge that she didn’t write Happy End. Brecht did take credit for the lyrics, but only at the insistence of the composer, Kurt Weill; the show’s best lyrics had in fact been written and even performed several years before Happy End hit the boards for its short, ill-fated run.
What does have bite in Happy End is the score–though here, again, the songs have virtually nothing to do with the script. The best songs aren’t even set in the exaggerated, shoot-’em-up Chicago that Brecht chose as the locale for the play; they are sailors’ songs, filled with references to shipwrecks and seductions in southeast Asia. Brecht was fascinated by the exotic east, and by the writing of Rudyard Kipling, poet of the British colonial experience. Happy End’s best song, “Surabaya Johnny”–surely one of the greatest love songs in musical theater–is in fact an adaptation of a Kipling poem. A desperately sad yet ironically distanced ballad about a girl hung up on a ne’er-do-well sailor, the song is used here by Lil to express her emotional confusion, torn as she is between her religious devotion and her desire for Bill.
Only Marilynn Bogetich, as the prim Salvation Army major who runs Lil put of the fold, comes off reasonably well among the leads. As for the ensemble–playing gangsters, cops, missionaries, and other lowlifes–they have no sense of danger or despair. Even in a misguided effort like Happy End, Brecht’s company of actors could communicate a sense of artistic and political principle and purpose. The cast of Happy End at Court, apparently helped by neither the playwright nor the director, seem mainly concerned with getting their lines out and being at the right place at the right time.
William Akey, a supporting-cast stalwart of previous Marriott productions, is wonderfully natural as Huck; Michael Lofton is a sweet-spirited, operatic-voiced Jim. Skipp Sudduth, looking like a Lynyrd Skynyrd leftover as Huck’s ornery Pap, offers a sad and scary portrait of the ravages of alcohol and ignorance. Susan Moniz and Mary Ernster, two of the best musical-theater actresses in town, add immensely to the show in their brief but telling roles as the unwanted but irresistible women in Huck’s young life. And though it didn’t produce any lasting hits, Roger Miller’s warmhearted and conversational country-gospel score is worth another listen.
