Review: The Counterfeit Opera, Fake Opera for a City of Frauds

To get to Little Island and the new musical playing there, The Counterfeit Opera, you must first walk through the Meatpacking District—that is, if you’re too poor to arrive by car. Once an industrial neighborhood filled with working-class men by day (and their imitators by night), it is now a playground for the city’s rich, full of boutiques and hotels with names like Rag & Bone and The Standard, belying how thoroughly removed from standard their clientele are—a continuation of the neighborhood’s half-century tradition of poverty cosplay.

The Counterfeit Opera feels right at home in these surroundings. A new adaptation of John Gay’s 1728 satire The Beggar’s Opera (which is best remembered through Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 adaptation, The Threepenny Opera), The Counterfeit Opera features new music by Dan Schlosberg, book and lyrics by Kate Tarker, and direction by Dustin Wills—the team that created the play (with opera) Montag. Wills and Schlosberg were also the brains behind last summer’s solo(ish) production of The Marriage of Figaro, which explains this musical’s hurried development process—just six months, according to the New York Times.

The jagged edges are noticeable in this show that was still going through script revisions until roughly five minutes before the audience arrived, but in many ways that works for the story.

At the top of the show, the cast bursts out of the back of a truck carrying bits of scenery and pushing a costume rack that reads “Property of the Metropolitan Opera.” The actors tell us that they’re criminals, but the good kind—charming rogues the likes of which once traveled the land and put on shows, before their jobs were stolen by upper-middle-class kids with MFAs.

They ask, “Can you afford your rent? … Can you afford to retire? … Can you afford to support a lawless, self-serving government of conmen?” And before we have a chance to answer for ourselves, Tony nominee Damon Daunno responds, “No! You can’t! Because you’re all poor!” The attorneys and asset managers in the audience avert their gaze, hoping not to be noticed by a cast whipped into a Brechtian frenzy, with no regard for the fourth wall.

Daunno plays the smooth criminal Macheath, who in this version is transformed into the captain of an NYC volunteer fire brigade circa 1855. He has recently eloped with Polly Peachum (Dorcas Leung), much to the chagrin of her parents (Ann Harada and Vin Knight), who fret that Mac knows far too much about the business model of their Five Points Emporium, having furnished so many of its wares by robbing burning houses. Plus, he’s Irish.

“You can’t put ketchup on a Catholic” is one of the funnier lyrics, delivered by Harada with devastating severity. It reminds us that the breathless nativism of today is destined to look ridiculous 170 years from now.

More concerning is Macheath’s propensity to cat around, which is understandable considering his dashing good looks and irresistible swagger—two qualities Daunno effortlessly supplies. More effortful are his vocals, which at their best recall Robert Plant in his prime (sound designer Sun Hee Kil engineers a sick echo off his rock scream during the rollicking number “Mulberry Moon”). But we can hear him tuckering out near the end of the show as Schlosberg’s unforgiving score forces him to leap from his baritone to falsetto and back again, causing him to nearly wipe out.

Not so for Lauren Patten, who plays disillusioned hooker Jenny Diver with a world-weary demeanor and tireless voice. The audience is transfixed during her performance of the marathon aria “My City Glows,” which she performs with misty eyes as she surveys the lights of Hoboken from across the water. Of all the cast members, she gets the closest to conveying the serious message of this often-silly musical when she later sings directly at the audience, “Why are you complying?”

Schlosberg’s overture, which sounds like Kurt Weill at the Mos Eisley Cantina, sets the tone for the following 100 minutes—an orgy of musical appropriation that is both fascinating and unruly as melodies emerge only to be quickly overtaken by new ones. It’s as if Schlosberg is shoplifting from the emporium of music by layering on the tunes he likes and wearing them out of the store. Dramaturgically, it’s the perfect choice, even if it occasionally makes the songs difficult to follow.

Several supporting performances stand out: Sola Fadiran makes a ghoulishly grinning Mr. Lockit, while Zenzi Williams is hilarious as the jailer’s jilted daughter (especially in her scenes with Leung). Emma Ramos affects an impressive smoker’s growl as Sukey Tawdry. Christopher Bannow and Rob Kellogg valiantly dive elbow-first into David Brimmer’s fight choreography as a pair of old-timey boxers. Everyone keeps up with a staging that could easily double as an eccentric gym routine.

Wills deploys his signature construction site aesthetic, with the actors creating scenes from moving scaffolds and rolls of carpet (the director designed the set with Lisa Laratta). Rodrigo Muñoz delivers hoop skirts and fat suspenders in his period costume design, which is mismatched enough to support the central conceit. Barbara Samuels gives us a sense of the chaos of the burgeoning city through her lighting, which employs spotlights in a satisfyingly 19^th-century fashion. A large steel structure on tracks looms over the stage, conjuring the ruined transfer bridge just up the river that, like this musical’s antique leftism, is a reminder of an industrialized society long gone.

The writers want to say something about our consumer-service economy and its present slouch toward feudalism. The leadup to America’s first Gilded Age seems like a logical allusion. But while 19^th-century nativism and avarice (timeless in America) strike a familiar chord, the parallels only go so far.

New York in 1855 was a city with few rules and regulations and was experiencing a feverish expansion of housing as newcomers with little to no education crowded into shabby tenements, buildings that sacrificed quality for speed of construction (as the creators of The Counterfeit Opera intimately know, you cannot have both). It really was another world from the sclerotic repository of the American elite we inhabit today.

I couldn’t help but note the irony as the cast shout-sang its farewell, about the rich subverting democracy as billionaires become trillionaires, while standing on an artificial island in the Hudson financed by a billionaire. We all agree that capital is corrupting our society, but we addicts gladly take a hit when it’s passed our way.