As our good luck would have it, in 1932 the English philanthropist Edward James commissioned Kurt Weill to compose a piece. James was married to the well-known dancer Tilly Losch and wanted a showcase for her. From the outset he knew that Weill’s wife was Lotte Lenya and expected the composer to include her in the project.
So even before Weill contacted his longtime, not infrequently estranged collaborator Bertolt Brecht, it was planned that whatever transpired would feature a dancer and a singer, or, as it’s described, a ballet chanté, or sung ballet. The irresistible outcome is the approximately 40-minute The Seven Deadly Sins, in which Anna I and Anna II are at first introduced as twin sisters but are more precisely—please follow this plot ploy—the same person. (The work’s original title was Anna Anna.)
A way to think of the Annas could be as the superego (Anna I) and the id (Anna II) vying for an ego’s dominance. But as the sisters work serially through seven deadly sins—sloth, pride, anger, gluttony, lust, avarice, envy—the Brecht-Weill superego is somewhat compromised as is the id. It’s as if Brecht refused to acknowledge—as Europe was coming to its knees with Adolph Hitler’s rise to power—that the superego or the id could be in any way completely pure. (Weill and Lenya had already fled Germany. Brecht, who’d fled and was living elsewhere, joined them in Paris.)
Now we’ve been gifted The Seven Deadly Sins, which premiered June 7, 1933 at the Theâtre des Champs Elysées and in which the two Annas leave their Louisiana home to spend seven years on the road attempting to raise enough money to build a new Mississippi riverbank abode on their return.
In perhaps some cockeyed bow to logic, the sisters indulge each sin for a year, from 1933 through 1939 (and the start of World War II), before returning intact and maybe wised up to where they’d begun. Yes, the venturesome ladies leave Louisiana for one unnamed United States destination and six others—Memphis, Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and San Francisco.
This is the mythical America that Brecht had in his head and for which Weill composed propulsive oom-pah-pah variations before he emigrated to the United States and began writing a different strain of sophisticated music. This is the mythical America the team immortalized two years earlier in The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagony, where the dollar is almighty. Oh, don’t ask why? Okay, possibly that observation isn’t so mythical.
Since the 1933 version (no performance record seems extant), many The Seven Deadly Sins interpretations have surfaced. The latest is the Opera North take as presented at the Leeds Playhouse in a keenly articulate 1980 translation by Michael Feingold. On the stage are seven disparate areas (George Johnson-Leigh the designer) in which each of the sins is ferociously enacted. Each, including a prologue and epilogue, is cleanly directed and choreographed by Gary Clarke and straightforwardly conducted by James Holmes. That’s if the adverbs “cleanly” and “straightforwardly” can be applied to anything like the blowzy, mesmerizing Seven Deadly Sins.
The mezzo Wallis Giunta is Anna I, wearing costumer Stephen Rodwell’s purple print housedress and singing purely, all the while projecting a dignity underpinned by the obdurately mercenary. Shelley Eva Haden is Anna II, in a matching purple-print housedress she rumples throughout. Haden has a lithe body she’s tirelessly able to bend into the unlikeliest angles.
The Annas aren’t the only ones telling their story. Four family members—father (Campbell Russell), mother (Dean Robinson), brothers (Stuart Laing, Nicholas Butterfield)—chime in with masculine gusto, as, among other fevered outpourings, they coax the sisters to bring home the house-building bacon.
It’s director-choreographer Clarke’s notion that the traveling Annas carry their meager belongings in valises. (Apparently the housedresses are their only outer apparel, although Anna II does have a tutu for her Memphis and Los Angeles performing gigs.) As a result, whenever the sisters journey from one town to the next, from one sin to the next, they pick up the valises and ploddingly move themselves about the set. Occasionally, father, mother and brothers avail themselves of valises as well. It’s also Clarke’s notion, likely based on Brecht’s preferred presentational style, that before each sin is luxuriantly acted out, signs specifying place, year, and the sin at hand are held aloft.
Note that presenting the opera during the pandemic, Clarke has underlined psychic distancing with stage social distancing. And why not? It could be said that sinning is an ever-present pandemic of its own.
Reviewer’s aside: For quite a while, I’ve been putting together a second set of seven sins. One is waste, but there’s nothing in the least wasteful about Clarke’s firm approach to the Brecht-Weill Seven Deadly Sins. Watch it for diabolical instructions, you non-sinners.
The Opera North production of Seven Deadly Sins opened November 21, 2020 at Leeds Playhouse and is available for pay-per-view streaming through November 23 at operanorth.co.uk
