The Komische Oper is the liveliest and least formal of Berlin’s three opera companies, and I have seen many great productions there over the years—most recently, in December, Andreas Homoki’s brilliantly directed Love of Three Oranges. So when I saw that Homoki had a My Fair Lady on this week, I jumped at the chance to get a ticket: social class is always one of his fascinations, and this well-known Lerner & Loewe work seemed tailor-made for that angle. A much-touted West Side Story, directed by Barrie Kosky, was also playing at the Komische later the same week; I decided to go to that too and round out my German experience of American musicals.
What’s unusual about the Komische, which was the “people’s opera” of the old East Berlin, is that all the productions are translated into German. I thought it would be difficult to render songs like “Just You Wait, Henry Higgins” and “The Rain in Spain” in German, and I was curious to see how they went about it. The answer was: skillfully, but not quite persuasively. Because my family owned the My Fair Lady album and I learned all the songs by heart as a child, I couldn’t help hearing the superior English lyrics in the background as the German ones were sung, and though that didn’t ruin the experience for me, it did make it odd. More problematic was the fact that the central tenet of My Fair Lady—the idea that a Cockney flower-girl can be converted into a high-born-seeming lady by altering her vowels and aspirated consonants—is utterly foreign to the Berlin notion of class, which is something at once more deeply rooted and less clearly audible. The German friend who accompanied me said that Katharine Mehrling, the actress playing Eliza Doolittle, did a good job of imitating the old Berlin working-class dialect, but that made no sense whatsoever of the songs in which Max Hopp, as Professor Henry Higgins, tried to get her to pronounce her Hs and As properly. And when Homoki tried to infuse his usual working-class enthusiasms into the plot—making Alfred Doolittle’s wedding scene, for instance, a symbol of honest vitality, set against the patent deadness of the aristocratic Ascot—that only made things worse. Watching these vain efforts, I realized (possibly not for the first time) that My Fair Lady is in fact about the superficiality of class, whereas the Brechtian productions I’ve loved at the Komische, Homolki’s among them, have at their core a belief in the essential nature of class. There is no such thing as essential nature in My Fair Lady—that is its point—and Homoki would have done better to use this musical as an occasion to mock, say, the typically British looniness of Brexit.
It was with fear and trepidation that I set out for last night’s West Side Story. I have always wholeheartedly loved the 1961 movie of this musical, with Robbins’s full-scale-genius dance numbers and Bernstein’s marvelous score; there isn’t a dud song in the bunch, and I often find myself humming the tunes in the course of my daily life. It is something I carry with me all the time—I just watched the movie again within the last year—and I dreaded seeing it eviscerated by a production that was touted as having all-new “testosterone-driven” choreography by someone named Otto Pichler. (This anxiety was not alleviated by the fact that I have hated almost all the dance I’ve ever seen on Berlin stages.) And then there was my profound disbelief in the idea that any Komische translation could ever replace the brilliant lyrics Stephen Sondheim came up with on this, his first venture into musical theater.
About the lyrics, I needn’t have worried: someone at the Komische (probably Barrie Kosky, the director) was smart enough to realize that the lyrics had to remain in their original English even though the dialogue was translated into German. So for the first time ever, I heard songs in this old East Berlin theater sung in a “foreign” language. I don’t know who decided that Sondheim was more important, more necessary, than Lorenzo da Ponte or W.H. Auden or the other verse-meisters they’ve translated in the past, but whoever it was was right: the cleverly rhyming, cunningly rhythmic words are essential to the music of this musical, and without them it probably would have gone down in flames.
The choreography, too, was about a hundred times—no, a thousand times—better than anything else I’ve ever seen in a German production. I don’t know about “testosterone-driven” (that would not have been my chosen descriptor, especially for the marvelous “I Like to Be in America,” which is danced entirely by women), but Pichler managed to update the gestures and make them his own without abandoning Robbins’s feel for the connection between street movement—that is, real-life movement—and dance. Time and again, I was thrilled by how beautifully the choreography matched both the music and the action. This was especially true of the charmingly silly dance set to “Officer Krupsky,” which actually made me laugh out loud, but it was true in a different way of the opening basketball sequence introducing the Jets and the Sharks, or the dance at the gym, rendered here as a kind of Berlin late-night club, complete with face masks, disco balls, and heavily booted women. That we couldn’t always tell Jets from Sharks felt strange at first—their skin colors and clothing and hair styles were pretty much the same, so you just had to keep track individually of who seemed to be antagonizing whom—but even that came to seem part of the point: the gang differences were being presented as socially constructed oppositions, not essential qualities. (Among other things, this twist gave a whole new ironic meaning to Anita’s song “Stick to Your Own Kind,” delivered in a very touching scene in which Anita and Maria end up sitting side by side on a bed, their backs to us.)
Throughout, in fact, the gesture of enacted emotion was as powerfully choreographed as the dances themselves. Anita’s lively temperament (embodied in a terrific Sigalit Feig), Riff’s charismatic leadership (danced and played by the very talented Christoph Jonas), Maria’s girlish delight in her new love (portrayed by a luminous Alma Sadé), and Tony’s and Maria’s avid kisses were persuasive in a way they aren’t always in the film. Johannes Dunz, as Tony, was a million times better than the ghastly stick-figure in the movie, though his excellence only showcased the fact that it is necessarily the character of Maria who always dominates the plot and makes it her own.
In the final sequence, after Tony is killed and Maria accuses both gangs of being responsible for his murder, Kosky made the intelligent decision not to have the two gangs come forward to carry the body off jointly, in the traditional healing gesture; instead he left them helplessly frozen in a surrounding semi-circle of observers—mirroring us, the still, silent audience—as we all watched Maria mourn her dead lover alone. In Berlin they have the guts to carry the tragedy all the way through like this, and it is worth it: the tears I shed at the end of this production felt, if anything, more clear-sighted and less sentimental than the ones that always flood my eyes when the beloved movie reaches its close.