Chicago Tribune - Recommended
"...The strengths of Graney's production include its huge visual canvas, consistently provocative style and a gut-busting intensity that raises the stakes sufficiently to sustain the length. All of his insights into the text are inventive and many are quite profound."
Chicago Sun Times - Recommended
"...Working in the vast open space of the Steppenwolf Garage, director Sean Graney and his troupe, the Hypocrites, have devised a tremendously bold, musically lush, physically ferocious revival of "Threepenny." The three-hour show doesn't fully coalesce. Its storyline sometimes gets muddied amid all the high theatricality, and bravura individual scenes tend to outweigh the whole. But there are so many ideas at work here, and such bottomless raw energy and youthful passion driving it all, that it never gets boring."
Daily Herald - Recommended
"...The Hypocrites provocative production - with its contemporary references and its audience asides - illustrates nicely Brecht's concept of epic theater appealing to intellect rather than emotion, the kind of theater that shakes up an audience, that forces them to shake off complacency and confront real-world issues and not simply immerse themselves in an illusion. If only it sang just a little sweeter."
Chicago Reader - Somewhat Recommended
"...Graney adds a touch of 21st-century star worship by emphasizing the weird idolatry directed at Macheath—on the familiar principle, apparently, that any outrage can be forgiven if it makes you rich and famous. Robert McLean’s Tiger Brown, in particular, takes the fawning to hilarious, homoerotic extremes. The production also updates Brecht’s consciously artificial theatrical style in sharp ways. Occupying the cavernous entirety of Steppenwolf’s Garage Theatre, Lee Keenan’s set offers a playground for performance."
Windy City Times - Somewhat Recommended
"...scale and acoustics also create problems: 15 people thundering across a wooden floor buries dialogue and music ( especially in Act I ) . Even with Michael Griggs's intelligent sound design, words are lost when performers are far off, and sometimes shouting singers lose melody lines as they struggle to hear the piano while negotiating Weill's devilishly tricky chromatics. Graney makes physical demands of his players that a veteran musical theater director would avoid and Actors Equity probably would forbid."
Centerstage - Highly Recommended
"...For one of the seminal classics of modern theater, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "The Threepenny Opera" has a surprisingly poor record on stage. Productions often have trouble balancing Brecht's fierce Marxist critique with his wicked sense of play, and frequently miss the proper style for Weill's scorching, gorgeous score. Happily, director Sean Graney's smashing production for The Hypocrites evades virtually all of the pitfalls, and makes for an exceptional evening of theater."
Edge - Somewhat Recommended
"...The Threepenny Opera is The Hypocrites first musical and where this production runs into some trouble is with sound. While pianist Timothy Splain plays quite well, his piano, stationed in the middle of the theatre, so dominates the soundscape that on the night I saw the show the singers were forced to screech the songs at the top of their lungs, and as a result all subtlety was lost. In fact, all too often it was almost impossible to hear and understand the lyrics."
Chicago Stage Review - Somewhat Recommended
"...The picture perfect ensemble stays totally focused on the scattered task at hand but sadly that focus does not transfer to the crowd and the story is all but lost. The show is so busy with physicality that it compromises content. The physical efforts are exceptional but ultimately we don’t believe or care enough about the characters for there to be a dramatic build."
Time Out Chicago - Somewhat Recommended
"...Despite the production’s blasé point of view, though, the bigger problem is one of elemental acoustics. The ambition here is as large as the entire Steppenwolf Garage, which is excitingly stripped bare and exposed in a warehouselike nakedness. Unfortunately, the voices aren’t as outsize as the staging (which lacks Graney’s usual scalpellike precision), and the faulty mikes are less than helpful. Though there are bawdy, full-throated exceptions—in particular, blustery autocrat Ehrmann as corrupted strongman Peachum and vicious comic dumpling Sevigny as his wife—much of Weill’s discordant dirge-score can’t be heard."
ChicagoCritic - Recommended
"...Threepenny” is more about spectacle and camp than stirring operatic singing. Don’t expect classical opera voices here with the non-Equity cast. Graney goes more for the satire and parody to covey Brecht’s socialist views than extreme quality singing. I was impressed with the work as a whole rather than the individual songs or performances."
