In Search of Mr. Peachum
 

The trouble with history, as I see it, is that nobody remembers it.  Well, that’s not quite true.  There are, of course, the 27 members of the World Historical Society who meet regularly in places like Machu Picchu, Babylon and Petra to talk about the good old times, but other than those ancient mariners, global institutional memory is all but a thing of the past.

How many people, for example, remember The Threepenny Opera?  It came hurtling out of the box in 1928 Berlin and some say it’s still hurtling.  But many Americans have never heard of it – only snippets of it.

3-penny, as I say it, introduced to the world the scalawag Mack-the-Knife or Mackie, as I like to call him and his darling Polly, who, at the time of their unofficial wedding said breathlessly, “Oh, Mackie,” (she also liked to call him that), “wherever you go, I will go with you.”  To which he responded with the honesty only a newlywed employs, “Well, if you’re goin’ with me, I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

One of the snippets we remember is Louie Armstrong singing the ‘Ballad of Mack the Knife’ in 1956 and Bobby Darin reprising it in 1959.  Darin’s version was so hugely popular it was banned by several U.S. radio stations because it was thought to encourage gang violence.  West Side Story could have had the same restriction on Broadway but the male danseurs were so effeminate everyone believed they actually represented danger in its cutest form.

Point is, 3-penny is a satiric look at the hard underbelly of crime and vice in every level of society.  Set just days before the coronation of Queen Vic (as I like to call her) in Soho, London, England, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain (which was much bigger then than it is today – ask any historian), the ‘opera’ introduced to audiences around the world catchy phrases like “Ahhhh, it has the ambrosia of a warm fart in a silk pantaloon.”  That ditty was modernized by noted Las Vegas prosecutor Elliott Sattler who proclaimed in a closing argument, “His alibi smells like a popcorn fart in a spacesuit.”  (I laughed at both of those, by the way).

By observing history, we’re supposed to learn from our mistakes and from the examples of others.  3-penny gave us so many rich examples of the errors of our ways that it’s hard not to embrace them reverently.  Bertolt Brecht, the author of the text / script / libretto presented us with such a bountiful cadre of characters who employed chicanery, deviousness and fraud to extract the purses from both common and aristocratic folk – money was money after all: didn’t matter from whence it came.

All the bandits, except notorious Mackie, were under the employ of Mr. Peachum, Polly’s dad (ergo Mackie’s dad-in-law).  Peachum was the ‘king of the beggars’.  He’d command his charges to cajole, inspire, distract, cuddle, arouse, depress, annoy and tempt their marks in order to realize a profit – the more one brought back to his stable the higher his / her stature in the beggar community.  And, like any bureaucracy, there were stiff penalties for failure to produce.

Next point: a friend of mine was walking along the elevated passageway that connects Bellagio to Caesars Palace the other day.  Two costumed characters (I think he said they were dressed like Spiderman and Scooby Doo) were bemoaning within earshot that they’d missed a perfect opportunity to score big with some unsuspecting targets (also known as tourists).  He too saw some pretty scantily clad young ladies who he classified as non-hookers, just in it (or out of it) for the photo-op.  I was reminded of the Girls of 3-penny including Sukey Tawdry, Jenny Diver and Lucy Brown (Lotte Lenya played Diver –Darin added her to his lyric out of respect), that inspired Judy Collins to sing Kurt Weill’s powerful show ballad ‘Pirate Jenny.’   Weill’s wife was Lenya, who aside from Jenny was also cast as the menacing Colonel Rosa Krebb in James Bond’s From Russia with Love.

In total, my friend that day saw seven Elvis’s (Elvi’s?), two Big Birds, five bottled water purveyors, twelve escort service marketeers and a partridge…well, you know the song.   What he said to me rekindled my love for 3-penny and begged (no pun intended) the question, is there a master vagabond out there directing hustler activity on Las Vegas Boulevard as there was in Soho oh so many years ago.

Makes me wonder too -- does whatever happens in the world actually get to the Strip – and does it ever stay there? 

-Thomas Tait