“Overture,” The Threepenny Opera
My last musical was in 1996 or 1997, The Threepenny Opera, a tri-part production at Stan State with the Drama department casting the roles and directing the play, the Music Department providing the band (directed by one professor) and the singers (directed by another).
If you wanted proof that divided leadership doesn’t work, this was it. The singing director was tied up with a choral assignment in Stockton forty minutes away and thus was often late and usually distracted. Besides, he didn’t want to make his singers feel bad by pushing them too hard so he never did, even when they needed it. The band director only cared what the band sounded like. He was generally a pain in the butt, not listening to anyone on anything, consulting only his inner muse, I guess. The band was situated in the middle of the stage, and playing as loud as it did, during performance you often couldn’t hear the singers sing. The singers, who made up all of the actors and singers aside from me, drove the Drama professor nuts with their attitude toward rehearsing. They thought it was like preparing for a recital: you rehearsed mostly on your own and in your own time, and god forbid you made it to a rehearsal at the stated time and that you were prepared or while you were rehearsing, you stopped talking jaa least when the director was speaking. As a result, the band dominated the production and all but one of the principal singers (me) was lost in the blare at least part of the time, and some of the acting was embarrassingly bad.
I was brought in, in desperation I think, to play Peachum, the king of the thieves. It’s a great role (something scarcer than you think in Brecht), conceived originally for the German stage and film actor Peter Lorre. By the time the production debuted, though, Lorre had left for Hollywood where henceforth he would be typecast in second rate roles in the movies. (His best Hollywood role was in The Maltese Falcon, where he played a degenerate of uncertain sexual proclivities with a strong preference for intrigue.)
I hadn’t sung for years but I couldn’t turn the part down. In addition to a great speaking part, I sang a longish solo, was in an even longer duet and a trio and had occasional other vocal parts to do. (I know you’re not supposed to count how many lines you have and how many songs you have in a show, but I did.)
I had a full beard when cast, left over from when I played the avenging husband, Chillingsworth, in a feminist rewrite of The Scarlet Letter. (Before that, I had been on stage wrapped in grubby bandages, liquid latex and dry oatmeal as Nagg in Endgame.) To look suitably sleazy and menacing for Threepenny, I cut off my chin hair and shaped the rest of the beard into a fearsome set of muttonchops. (It was a truly ugly beard style.) I shaved down the hair on top of my head (well, the sides) to a half-inch burr. That, plus a great costume, transformed me into Peachum, King of the Thieves.
Unfortunately, I have no photos of the show, nor any video of it, so it’s memory. But here’s what I looked like Scarlet Letter and Endgame. 
(Did you think I was kidding about the liquid latex?)
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
“Peachum’s Morning Song,” The Threepenny Opera
MUSIC & ME 