La Opera de Tres Centavos

After participating in last year’s ‘The good woman of Setzuan’, I wondered how professional actors presented a play by Brecht. ‘La opera de Tres Centavos’ was my chance to understand fully how to act using Brecht’s techniques.

Friday’s play was entertaining but I didn’t like several aspects about it. First of all, it was too long. The play could have easily been perfect with duration of one hour and a half. Each act lasted close to 1 hour and 15 minutes, so by the second act I couldn’t take more of it.

There were too many songs. Each scene ended with a song sung by the characters present in that scene, where they expressed their feelings about the situation. By the 3rd song, the structure of the play was predictable: scene-song-scene-song-scene-song… and on and on and on. This basically made the rhythm of the play be the same all the time. Thus, by the second act I was tired of watching the same thing. I couldn’t concentrate.

I didn’t like the images portrayed in the background. These black and white pictures were confusing because they were very contrasting to the actions that were going on. The play looked like colorful like a fairytale, and the dull colors of the images changes the mood of the audience. I didn’t understand the purpose of those pictures.

Positive things about the play: many.
The costumes were impressive. They were very well done and represented perfectly the personality of the characters. There were changes in costume when the actors changed characters. Make-up added to the costumes.

Scenery was great. It was very interesting to see how they used the same structure to represent different things. For example, at the beginning the structure were one character sell tickets for what it seemed to be a circus, was turned backwards and used as the place where Poli’s mother hung the clothes to dry. The desk used by Jonathan was gigantic. This definitely added importance to Jonathan’s characters, but also was great for the use of levels in the scene.

Acting was exceptional. The actors played the Brecht technique almost perfectly. Their positions and face expressions excellent. The most memorable character, I believe was Poli. She had great use of column (which she forced backwards and sideways) and she reacted to everything that happened in the scene. Her use of voice was also very good and funny.

I can’t tell that this play was excellent, but I admit that it was nicely done and the groups of actors were very good. I didn’t like the fact that there were too many songs. Singers are performers like actors. What distinguishes the performance done by an actor than the one done by a signer? Can singers be actors? Can actors be singers? Are musicals better than plays without songs?