Mahagonny, the spider-web city sucking in men (and they are, even in this 2026 take, mostly men) with cash to burn, is the terminus of human greed and stupidity. It takes the first joint project between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, the perfect Mahagonny-Songspiel of 1927, only 20 minutes to get to the end, only to brush it aside with a shrug. The big operatic version, work on which was interrupted by their greatest hit, The Threepenny Opera, spins it out for oh so much longer, and needs a tight, springy production and conducting as well as a tireless heroic tenor as rebel protagonist Jimmy MacIntyre.
ENO has got the tenor, luxury casting in the shape of top Wagnerian Simon O'Neill, but not the right production (nor did it last time round; nor did the Royal Opera more recently). Up to this point Jamie Manton gave us a misfire Britten Paul Bunyan, a forgettable Cunning Little Vixen and a surprise success, a hospital-set Magic Flute at the Royal Academy of Music which carried through very movingly. His Mahagonny isn't sharp enough in the vasts of the London Coliseum; having avoided neon and glitz, he and designer Milla Clarke creates a crate city which takes up a very small part of an open stage, always dangerous here (viz Calixto Bieito's Carmen).
Choreography for the chorus - vocally fine when singing a cappella - is by :Lizzie Gee, too innocent and clunky (it worked for G&S). Two dancers doubling as rent boys, Damon Gould and Adam Taykor, get a few laughs as a Cloud and the tap-dancing typhoon that circumvents the apparently doomed city. The final apocalypse, shorn of individuals carrying contrary banners (this is even advertised in the synopsis), is a slightly so-what showbiz stomp.
From stalls right, the ENO Orchestra under Andre de Ridder, laying down his credentials as the company's Music Director Designate, seems to favour tuba and other brass at the expense of woodwind, so melodies aren't always clear; this should still only be a 30-piece orchestra after the 10 razor-sharp players of the Mahagonny-Songspiel. Co-ordination with beefed-up vocal forces after the six singers of the original work can be loose, too. Maybe some of the problem must rest with over-extended scenes (after Jimmy's revelation in the night of the typhoon that anything should be allowed, the "having sex" and boxing stretches seem to go on for ever). Weill relished stretching his repertoire of Bachian chorales, Hindemith-style 1920s modernism and popular song to the limit, but it doesn't all work, and possibly never will.
Despite apparent miking of various sorts, not all the voices carry. Rosie Aldridge's entrepreneurial criminal-on-the-run Widow Begbick is commanding in flare-ups; of Jimmy's Alaskan fellow lumberjacks, Elgan Llyr Thomas (pictured above second from left with Aldridge, Alex Otterburn and David Shipley) is clarion of tenor voice and clear of diction (and the scene where Jack O'Brien eats himself to death is one of the few hallucinatory moments in the production). Danielle de Niese showed well in the rehearsal clip of the "Alabama Song" ENO posted on YouTube, but she doesn't quite fill the space, and though she puts across the number we know as "Wenn Mann sich bettet, so liegt Mann" - "As you make your bed, so you must lie in it", working much better in the original German, like most of the lyrics, than Jeremy Sams' hit-and-miss translation - the microphone here is too much.
No doubt about it, though, this is O'Neill's night. Jon Vickers said he'd never sing the role on stage as the demands were greater than those of Siegfried; this Wagnerian makes it all sound fearlessly easy, and the eve-of-execution solo is the most powerful stretch of the evening. The rest is not-so-easy come and go. Undeniably, though, Brecht's 20th century myth still resonates in the 21st. There are, bizarrely, only three performances, so you have until Friday to find out for yourself.
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