German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was one serious dude. He called for a new form of live entertainment: "epic theater," in which empathetic identification with the characters was downplayed in favor of sociopolitical reflection. The characters represented movements, not individuals. The audience was meant to feel distanced from the action, so the characters would often break the fourth wall to address audience members directly. Sets were unrealistic, the house fully lit. This approach, Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt ("alienation effect"), prevented the audience from experiencing catharsis and thereby drifting back into complacency. Instead, he hoped viewers would rise against the capitalist machine.

Dr. Noel Koran is Tacoma Opera's General Director. He's also the stage director of a new production of The Threepenny Opera, a 1928 musical collaboration between Brecht and composer Kurt Weill (based on John Gay's Beggar's Opera from 1728). "This was a direct attempt to write entertainment for the masses," Koran explained. "At the time in Germany, there was a lot of interest in jazz form and American modern music, so they used that as the base. The Weimar Republic was going through some really rough times. People were incredibly poor. There was a disproportionate distribution of wealth." Sound familiar? "It's not just today, it's throughout history," Koran agreed. "It's about the one percent that has all of the wealth and power versus the 99%. It's about financial inequity (and) how people survive under really horrible circumstances, and that's essentially what we've had a taste of since 2008."

So how does a director juggle Brecht's political and aesthetic agenda with the exuberance of the music, not to mention his audience's desire to escape harsh reality? "It's the great challenge of this piece," Koran acknowledged. "We're making the choice to present this as a very theatrical play. You have a soft-shoe and a couple of vaudeville-type numbers in the show, and they come out of nowhere. It takes everyone by surprise. Oddly enough, the soft-shoe and vaudevillian numbers are done by the most serious characters. It's counterintuitive. There's no attempt whatsoever on anybody's part to pretend this is real. It's a production. They're makin' a play."

The Threepenny Opera follows Macheath, a thuggish criminal in Victorian London. Thanks to Marc Blitzstein's 1954 English translation, we know Macheath better as "Mack the Knife." The chorus sings, "You must try not to shirk the facts. Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts." That attitude reflects Brecht's pragmatic slogan, "First comes food, then the morality,"an adage that surely resonated with emaciated actors in a 1945 Berlin production, the first after World War II. Some had been recently imprisoned in concentration camps. They wore rags. The audience reached their performance space by crawling over ruins.

An audience member's appreciation of The Threepenny Opera may vary directly with his or her cynicism, the same snarky attitude that drives SNL, John Oliver, and our present-day political comedy. "I find it a very powerful work, and edgy," Koran mused. "We're using a bit of German expressionism. It's what the piece lends itself to. German expressionism was an art movement that used stark imagery to emphasize its subjects social and psychological distortion. The art in Koran's production mimics the work of expressionist painter Käthe Kollwitz, whose black-and-white images documented the misery and destitution of her (and Brecht's) era.

"I'll tell ya," Koran laughed, "if it wasn't for Weill and his music, this would be one really serious play. It's unusual, but it's very entertaining."

THE THREEPENNY OPERA, 7:30 p.m. Fri. and Sat.; 2 p.m. Sun., Tacoma Opera, Rialto Theater, 310 S. 9th St., Tacoma, $25-$80, 253.627.7789