Irina Brook’s Brecht–Weill triptych at La Scala confronts our broken world through recycled glamour and bitter song

The glamour is seductive. The rhythm infectious. But the mirror is unforgiving. In Irina Brook’s uncompromising triptych at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, currently playing through 30 May, the world of Brecht and Weill becomes a looking glass for our own, reflecting a society where morality, compassion and even the scenery itself have been traded for profit.

Three works form the spine of the evening: Mahagonny Songspiel, Happy End and Die sieben Todsünden. Each was written in the interwar years as a response to capitalism’s unravelling logic. Irina Brook treats them not as museum pieces but as urgent dispatches from a past uncomfortably close to the present.

This production had its beginnings in 2021, when Irina Brook first mounted Die sieben Todsünden and Mahagonny Songspiel as a diptych for an empty La Scala, performed during the pandemic and streamed by Rai Cultura. That pared-down version, created within the constraints of lockdown, laid the groundwork for the fully staged version that has now returned to the house with the addition of Happy End. The result is a reimagined dramatic arc, stitched together by irony, violence and a strange kind of joy.

Photo credit Brescia e Amisano © Teatro alla Scala

Irina Brook, daughter of the late theatre legend Peter Brook and a director with a long track record across major international houses, has regularly reimagined opera and theatre with disarming clarity. At La Scala, her 2021 Brecht–Weill staging set a high bar. This new iteration goes even further, fusing the works’ disparate elements into a single vision. Mahagonny’s consumerist dystopia, Happy End’s underworld salvation narratives and the fractured identity of the two Annas in Die sieben Todsünden all converge in a world of detritus and desire.

The production’s visual logic is as deliberate as its dramaturgy. Constructed entirely from recycled materials, the set is both a political gesture and an aesthetic one. In Irina’s hands, Mahagonny is not a glittering metropolis but a wasteland dressed in sequins, where collapse hides in plain sight. Glamour is repurposed trash. Decay wears rouge.

The timing of this production carries symbolic weight, with the opening night (14 May) coinciding with the anniversary of Milan’s Piccolo Teatro, founded by Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler. Strehler himself directed Mahagonny at La Scala in 1964, part of a rich tradition of Brecht performances in Milan that spans back to the early 1960s. The Piccolo’s tradition of politically engaged theatre finds contemporary expression in Irina Brook’s approach. When Brecht and Weill conceived these works – Mahagonny Songspiel in 1927, Happy End in 1929, and Die sieben Todsünden in 1933 – they were responding to the moral collapse and economic turbulence of their own moment. Their fictional Mahagonny, built in the desert to exploit human desires, served as a prescient metaphor for capitalism’s self-destructive trajectory. Nearly a century later, as environmental catastrophe looms and social inequality reaches vertiginous heights, Irina Brook’s triptych functions as both historical document and urgent commentary. The production reminds us how the city of Mahagonny eventually loses its allure, its inhabitants abandoning it for new horizons once its depravity becomes routine.

The former artistic director of Théâtre National de Nice, however, says she is not interested in overt messaging. “If I staged a group of environmentalists shouting their convictions, nobody would come,” she told the Rivista del Teatro. “But with dance rhythms and musical comedy style, perhaps the message gets through.” It does. The contradiction between Weill’s exuberant music and Brecht’s brutal clarity becomes the very engine of the piece. Entertainment and critique do not cancel each other out – they sharpen each other.

Photo credit Brescia e Amisano © Teatro alla Scala

The cast delivers with unflinching precision. Alma Sadé, Lauren Michelle and Wallis Giunta anchor the performance with striking vocal and physical presence. Markus Werba brings a charismatic edge to gangster Bill Cracker. Giunta’s closing rendition of Youkali, a tango-habanera composed by Weill in exile and later set to Fernay’s utopian lyrics, is the production’s only glimmer of unbroken yearning. It is not a resolution but a coda: a dream of a place where human dignity might matter again. No such island exists, but the longing is real.

At the podium, Riccardo Chailly shapes the orchestra with the precision of someone who has lived with this music for decades. His affinity with Weill’s hybrid textures – chamber modernism infused with Berlin cabaret, Broadway swing and early jazz – goes back to the 1970s. Here, he keeps the ensemble taut, alive to the music’s pulse and bite. “The singing,” Chailly once observed, “must not be metric like Hindemith. It must dance around the orchestra, with ductility.” Under his baton, it does.

The intrigue of this production is therefore not its message, but its tension. Irina Brook leaves contradictions intact. The cabaret entertains, but never quite lets us off the hook. Brecht’s cynicism about capitalism is not tempered. Weill’s melodies seduce, even as they carry the taste of decay. Nearly a century after these works first shocked audiences in Baden-Baden, Berlin and Paris, their diagnoses still hold. Perhaps more than ever.

As the lights fade and the final strains of Youkali dissolve, the question remains whether Milan, or any city, can recognise itself in Mahagonny. Irina Brook does not answer. She merely holds up the mirror and waits.

Lead image by Brescia e Amisano © Teatro alla Scala; all other photos as credited