Toxic Dispatches From Weimar

I mean as cold as a body on a mortuary table. The first real chill of autumn hit New York with the arrival of Robert Wilson’s frost-bitten interpretation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Threepenny Opera,” which opened on Tuesday night at the Howard Gilman Opera House of theBrooklyn Academy of Music.

Halloween may be the official date on which corpses are said to rise from their graves to taunt and terrorize the living. But the cadaverous members of the Berliner Ensemble who inhabit Mr. Wilson’s production, which runs through Saturday, decided not to wait to throw their own special Walpurgisnacht.

And while you may think you’ve seen these glamorous ghouls before — especially if you’ve ever seen a Wilson show or, for that matter, any production of the musical “Cabaret” — don’t dismiss them as chic trick-or-treaters until you’ve heard them sing. Their voices really do come from beyond the grave, or to be exact, from Berlin in 1928, when the original “Threepenny Opera” opened there, making sounds the world had never heard before.

Usually the eyes have it when Mr. Wilson is in charge. Even in his collaborations with composers like Philip Glass (for the breathtaking “Einstein on the Beach”), what you see usually lingers in the memory more than what you hear. For Mr. Wilson is a magician at whipping up exquisite dreamscapes, fluid yet fragmented visions that seem to have stepped out of the darkness of your sleeping mind.

But despite the usual eye-popping lineup of elegant Wilsonian grotesques, this time it’s your ears that keep you awake, anxious and often enthralled. In this production’s artfully ragged, disturbingly dissonant music — summoned by nine perfectly calibrated musicians and by singers whose voices are the opposite of those of Broadway-trained crooners and belters — you feel something of the shock of the new that Berlin theatergoers must have experienced 90-some years ago.

In the minds of many Americans “The Threepenny Opera,” a snarling, impudent reinvention of the 18th-century English “Beggar’s Opera” by John Gay, exists mostly as one of those legendary shows that changed culture that are more often discussed than experienced. Though the frissons it set off in its Berlin opening were said to travel around the world, it has often baffled American interpreters.

A popular Off Broadway incarnation in the 1950s (which starred Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya) is still remembered with proprietary fondness by those who saw it, as is Richard Foreman’s 1976 production at Lincoln Center. But in recent years especially, American actors and the “Threepenny” songs have made for sorry mismatches. Too often singers succumb to the temptation to make love to Weill’s hypnotic melodies, when what’s required is that they be roughed up, played with and discarded, a bit the way Macheath (the show’s felonious hero, played here by Stefan Kurt) treats his women.

Listen to Brecht on the subject: “When an actor sings, he undergoes a change of function. Nothing is more revolting than when the actor pretends not to notice that he has left the level plain of speech and started to sing.” The actor, he continued, should not try to bring out “emotional content” nor should he obediently follow the melody. In other words, only disconnect, and keep your audience aware that a song is merely a song.

I’ve never known that theory to be put to practice in live performance as thrillingly as it is in this production, which has musical direction by Hans-Jörn Brandenburg and Stefan Rager. From the scrappy, combative strains of the overture — in which the music seems almost to give up on itself in disgust — you intuit that this is not an evening of ear candy.

That suspicion is confirmed once the actors begin to sing — or rather, growl, belch and warble their notes and lyrics. This is singing that at the same time expresses character and disdains sentimental notions that character might be glorified by song.

Listening to love ballads, in particular, is like watching someone shredding a valentine with an X-Acto blade. And when performed by the brilliant Stefanie Stappenbeck or Angela Winkler, as two of Macheath’s women, these songs glow with an enlivening toxicity that makes you want to swear off easy-listening forever.

I was less entranced by the mise-en-scène as a whole. In reworking Gay’s original operetta of the dispossessed for angry Weimar Germany, Brecht and Weill pushed the era a hundred years forward, from London in the 18th century to the time of Queen Victoria’s coronation. That decorous age, with its bourgeois pieties and hypocrisies, was viewed in the distorting mirrors of a criminal underclass, which in turn was meant to reflect the socially corrupt Germany of the 1920s.