Threepenny for your thoughts

News flash from bizarro world: The Hypocrites are doing a musical. Yes, the company that has spent 11 years radicalizing “serious theater”—Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard as Altmanesque sitcom, María Irene Fornés’s Mud staged in a room-size glass tank—now tackles the form best known for its splashy showbiz hokum. But the ambitious troupe won’t touch any of the optimistic behemoths that Oklahoma! and its progeny have loosed upon the theatrical world. Instead, it’s mounting the harsh, discomfiting, dance-hall socialist attack on bourgeois complacency that is Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera.

When the Hypocrites decided to do the show, in which the self-serving, conscience-free hoodlum Macheath becomes the inescapable end-product of capitalism, musical director Kevin O’Donnell looked forward to concocting his own arrangements of Kurt Weill’s haunting score. O’Donnell has provided original music for many Hypocrites productions over the years— Machinal, Equus, 4.48 Psychosis—and for several other Chicago theaters as well. This would be the first time he’d direct someone else’s score.

But to his chagrin, he quickly learned what any veteran Broadway producer could’ve told him: You don’t mess with a canonized score. The mighty Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, which controls the rights to the Marc Blitzstein adaptation of Threepenny, licenses only one arrangement, which requires an eight-piece band. Unable to compensate eight musicians, the scrappy ’Crites made special arrangements with R&H to use an arrangement for solo piano, so long as they didn’t change a note.

Turning the score into an inviolate artifact best suited for museum warehousing may make purists happy, but it’s antithetical to Brecht and Weill’s approach to theater, which prized process above product. Moreover, in notes for Threepenny, Brecht explicitly encouraged actors to meddle with Weill’s music. “So far as melody is concerned, [the actor] need not follow it blindly; there is a way of speaking-against-the-music which can be very effective just because of an obstinate matter-of-factness independent of and incorruptible by music and rhythm.”

But what R&H wants, R&H gets. The Hypocrites’ contract did allow for minor adjustments in the score, as long as they received approval, yet O’Donnell was left wondering just what his job was supposed to be. “In the past, I’ve always had to make every musical decision at every step of the way,” he says. “But now it’s as though all those decisions have already been made. I hear a great piece of Weill’s music sung well, played well; it’s hard to feel like I’m doing anything. Maybe my title should be ‘tempo director.’ ”

Still, he’s found inspiration in adversity. “Working within such tight constraints can really focus your choices,” he explains. “A slight change in pulse can often clarify an idea. And the exact length of an eighth note is up for interpretation.”

It helps that his accompanist is Tim Splain, the 24-year-old piano whiz kid who tore up Joshua Schmidt’s demanding score for Adding Machine at Next Theatre and Off Broadway. “Whatever change I need, a slight change in mood or pace or whatever, Tim can do immediately,” O’Donnell says. “With a single, good musician, small changes can have enormous musical significance. And if I’m foolish enough to consider a key change, he’ll know the historical context to explain why the song is in A-flat.”

For Splain, Weill’s music holds as much irony as beauty. “The score is full of parodies of operatic conventions of Weill’s day,” he says. “And the tension, of course, is that it’s not necessarily meant to be sung by operatic singers. ‘Prettiness’ in singing is a choice an actor can make, but it’s often not the most successful choice given the material at hand.”

The elevation of the nonpretty voice scandalized Berlin eight decades ago, and it still has its theatrical use today, if only to jar an audience from its, well, bourgeois complacency. “When you’re in a Broadway house and the actor starts singing, an audience starts tapping its toes and humming along,” O’Donnell says. “But they’re not attending to the song as dramatic event. So in the end, my job is to get audiences to rehear and reunderstand things they’ve heard so many times before.” Which has always been the Hypocritical way.

Threepenny begins previews Saturday 30.