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The Bangers' Flopera

nytheatre.com review by Martin Denton
August 15, 2005

The Banger's Flopera by Kirk Wood Bromley and John Gideon, billed as "a musical perversion," is surely one of the most overtly raunchy, in-your-face-assailing shows ever put up at FringeNYC. This is by design: the program carries a "Parental Advisory: Explicit Content" warning label and I'm sure I heard someone from the production announce beforehand that if the show doesn't offend you then it's not working. (There is, additionally, a full page of explanatory warnings by Bromley and director Ben Yalom in the program.)But when I left The Banger's Flopera, I was neither shocked nor offended.There's greatness in this piece, which "perverts" John Gay's The Beggar's Opera but mostly by way of the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill adaptation of same called The Threepenny Opera. How audacious is it to begin an American musical in 2005 with a challenge to Weill's classic "Moritat," signifying that yes, we know there's already a song about "Mack the Knife" that's phenomenally famous but we don't give a #&!%? What's cool is that the opening really works: uber-mobster Macheath massacres the patrons in a swanky NYC supper club with utterly affectless precision: nobody tries to stop them, nobody (killers included) cares about or seems moved by what's occurred; and when the scene is over, the victims pick themselves up like the zombies that they already were and go on to Scene Two.Elsewhere in Banger's we catch glimpses of the brilliant update to Threepenny that this show is poised to be. This speech, for example, delivered by one of Macheath's henchman (a transvestite), pretty much floored me:I’d like to exchange my most precious Commodity—“free time”—for seven things I don't need that were made by people I don't know who engage in activities I don't approve of so they can create A society that doesn't include me.But a great deal of Banger's feels designed merely to gross us out rather than make us think. Bromley has made the prostitutes of Threepenny into porn stars, for example, and there are several numbers about the sex trade and sexual abuse (not too mention a character wielding an oversized but more-or-less realistic-looking penis, utilized in a scene about making a porn flick). This stuff may jolt, at first, but there's so much of it that after a while I just started to feel numb—the exact opposite, I think, of what the creators intend. A ruthless editor needs to cut a lot of this 2-hour-45-minute show to get to the meaty ideas that will make it not just sensational but urgent. And those ideas need focusing: where Brecht's message was essentially that economics is at the root of society's ills, Bromley ranges much farther, and the results are sometimes confusing and/or muddy.Gideon's music is, appropriately, loud punk, rock, gangsta rap, and (occasionally) commercial-sounding pop. The 17-member ensemble is strikingly committed to the material, with the standout April Vidal as Polly, who is given the score's most arresting number, "Gangstas Make a Girl Gush," and delivers it with show-stopping panache.Much more can and will be said about this show. Hardy FringeNYC-goers should consider taking it in; this could be Something once the creators do more work on it. Threepenny held up a mirror to its complacent German audience and the ugliness it reflected back at them stung. I can't wait for The Banger's Flopera to do exactly the same for Bush-Era America.