It was a predominantly older audience that populated the Spiegeltent on a Sunday evening. They were obviously better informed than myself as to what this show would consist of. Sold on the description of the program guide that described these three as “The 3 Stooges of cabaret”, so I decided to take a punt on it in the hopes of finding some form of comedy in the show. What I experienced was highly entertaining performances of musical theatre that had enough humour to offset some darker, more serious pieces.
The three men in question, John O’May, Martin Croft & Mark Jones, performed a show that paid tribute to the composer Kurt Weill (pronounced “Vile”, thus the title) who wrote numerous shows during the 20s to 40s. There was some explanation of Weill’s work, detailing the shows he collaborated on & several songs from each were performed.
They began with the show “The Threepenny Opera” which apart from a song centering around two prostitutes arguing, was quite dark material. From what I could gather, it revolved around Whorehouses, violence & revenge. Quite sensibly, a couple of lighter & risque songs were included during this section of the show to give the audience a break from the serious stuff.
The next show covered was “Happy End” & it was revealed that the storyline was quite similar to “Guys & Dolls” (which was written 15 years later). This was a cue for a rather painful pun about “Guys & Dolls” lyricist Frank Loesser (“I now think Loesser of him” or something like that!).
I felt that it terms of humour, the show really took off when they started a section about the Broadway show “Lady In The Dark”. It was a show about Psychotherapy which starred Danny Kaye. With a such a bizzare theme & the involvement of Kaye, it was certainly going to contain numerous humorous songs. The highlight of this section was the performance of “Tschaikowsky and Other Russians” which is a song listing all of the Russian composers.
The show was concluded by a performance of Weill’s most well known song “Mack The Knife”, beginning with a rendition by John with it’s original German lyrics. The other two joined in, but it soon degenerated into random German words. John then feigned disgust at their performance & joined the audience to heckle the other two as they performed the song as they imagined it would have been performed by other artists. Versions by Dame Joan Sutherland & Ricky Martin were amongst them as well as an aborted rap version (where the bad beat boxing sounded more like Rolf Harris!).
Although the anarchy of the three stooges was not evident in the show, the three men were highly engaging performers. Their banter & interaction between & during songs was a great source of comedy in the show in addition humorous lyrics of some songs. All were performed using just a single piano & their 3 voices, each given many songs to sing lead. It was particularly interesting that they sang many songs in which the main character was female. They resisted putting on a hammy falsetto vocals, instead singing them straight. However there was a little bit of sexy slinking about with their movements & gestures to indicate a feminine persona.Overall it was a fantastic show where I was entertained & actually learnt a great deal about a composer about whom I had not know much about previously.