A Noise Within March 2015 eNews

What voice training have you had as an actor? How did you prepare for all the singing in this play?

Marisa Duchowny (Polly Peachum): 

Growing up, I never took voice lessons. Singing was fortunately a gift I was born with and always came very naturally to me. Later, in graduate school, I learned the fundamental techniques, but I truly learned how to sing by sitting alone in my bedroom as a little girl and mimicking the sounds of the soulful Ella Fitzgerald, Whitney Houston, Simon & Garfunkel, and The Beatles. So preparing to sing as Polly Peachum was very much out of my comfort zone. Warming up before every rehearsal and performance was essential in order to expand my range and sing clearly in Polly’s high mezzo soprano register. I also put a lot of my attention on the text sung in each song. I think it’s important to emphasis the story behind the words and take the audience on a journey as if they are hearing a character speak a monologue. It was also very helpful to have our wonderful musical director, DeReau Farrar, there to support the technical aspects of the songs and stay true to the music of Kurt Weill.
How did you learn the Cockney accent?

Matthew Ian Welch (Sawtooth Bob): I have always had a knack for imitating voices and accents, but a knack will only take you so far. I primarily learned a Cockney accent by listening to recordings of authentic speakers and imitating them. I have also studied the “rules,” or the most common shifts in vowels and changes in consonants as catalogued by linguists. For this show, specifically, the assistance of ANW’s dialect coach, Nike Doukas, has been indispensable.

What challenges did you deal with in making an historically provocative piece of theatre accessible to the modern audience and times? 

Julia Rodriguez-Elliott (Co-Director): This is a very good question, and one that all directors must look straight in the eye. On the one hand, what’s remarkable is that The Threepenny Opera was way ahead of its time in so many ways–it was the precursor of edgy musicals like Cabaret and the forerunner of ’70s and ’80s performance art–that it doesn’t need to be modernized per se. But while many of the themes, though certainly relevant today, were based on actual events of the early 20^th century, so we needed to make these very clear. One way we did this was through the use of themed placards, which are displayed even before the play starts. At the same time, we have emphasized key lines and textual components that make the milieu and themes very clear to modern audiences–it’s a question of playing these up without being overbearing or obvious. For instance, one message we absolutely wanted to convey was how the privileged classes get away with figurative murder while the lower ones are actually convicted. This said, the themes are so rife and rich that they stand on their own, and our conversations with audience members tell us that they’re really seeing the contemporary parallels to the world Brecht portrays.

Did Deborah have as much fun doing her big number as it looked? Did she have trouble being so physical while wearing all that padding?
Deborah Strang (Mrs. Peachum): It’s more fun that you can even imagine. Brecht always attempted to remind his audience that they were watching a performance and that there is no separation between the actor and the spectator. While breaking the fourth wall is always a bit terrifying, our patrons…READ MORE