On Broadway: Penny Wise: Aszure Barton's Broadway debut brings a post-modern edge to Brecht and Weill's dark classic.

When Mikhail Baryshnikov created his Baryshnikov Arts Center last year, the hope was that someday its painters, choreographers, musicians, and directors would feed off one another and push their work in new directions. Well, as they say in advertising, someday is here. Last June, the 30-year-old Canadian choreographer Aszure Barton (see "Dance Matters," p. 22) was one of the Center's first artists-in-residence, creating Over/Come on 13 specially selected students. This June, she's on Broadway, designing moves for the Roundabout Theater's new production of the deliciously sardonic Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill musical The Threepenny Opera. And it's all because of the Center, which is housed, along with several commercial theaters, in a new building on West 37th Street in Manhattan.

"While I was at BAC working with the students," says Barton, "we all went downstairs to see Hurlyburly." The students enjoyed it so much, we invited the cast and the director up to see a showing of the piece we were doing. Scott Elliott, who was the director of Hurlyburly, came to me and said, 'I've fallen in love. I've met my match.' And he asked me if I would choreograph Threepenny."

Barton, who grew up in Edmonton, had never worked in musical theater and had, in fact, barely seen any. But she said yes immediately. "I've always wanted to work with actors," she says. The fact that she'd be coming, untested, to the Great White Way? "It didn't hit me at first. I didn't even know it was a Broadway production. I'm so naive!"

When it finally sank in that at 30 she was going to be choreographing a high-visibility, high-stakes Broadway musical with theater stars (Alan Cumming, Jim Dale), music stars (Cyndi Lauper, Nellie McKay) and even a TV star (Ana Gasteyer), she still managed to stay cool. "I was happy that it was Threepenny. The music is so incredible--it was a perfect project for me to be a part of. It has so much integrity. I could really invest in it." It didn't hurt that Elliott told her he wanted her non-Broadway sensibility on the stage--he didn't want it to look like anything he'd ever seen before.

It doesn't. This Threepenny, newly translated from the German by actor/playwright Wallace Shawn, begins with the actors marching onstage from the back of the house. Once there, they face each other in pairs and take turns penciling in their partners' outre eye makeup. Then they face the audience and sing "The Ballad of Mack the Knife"--renamed "Song of the Extraordinary Crimes of Mac the Knife" in the Shawn translation. Brecht's famous theories about maintaining theatrical distance are very much in evidence.

The dance sequences are similarly presentational--dance numbers clearly enclosed by quotation marks. The opening song ends with a glum simulacrum of a kick-line spread across the proscenium, with the actors looking as if they're kicking with 20-lb. weights circling their ankles. Which is exactly as it should be. For all its gorgeous music and high comedy, this is still a musical about thieves, murderers, prostitutes, informers, and, of course, blatantly corrupt cops. Still, Elliott and Barton could have taken the show in a more naturalistic direction. But they found as the piece developed in rehearsal that "less was more."

At first, Barton says, she tried to give each cast member his or her own bits of movement. "I worked individually with them. I didn't want it to be steppy--it had to come from the story, the words that they're speaking or singing. My work," she adds, "comes from the inside. It's more emotional than teaching them steps."

With a cast running the gamut from Jim Dale, whose agility and physical grace are well-established (Broadway veterans have fond memories of his cavorting in Scapino and Barnum), to Nellie McKay, who is basically a concert performer, Barton devised a kind of sliding scale of moves for each character. "What I was striving for was for all of them to bring themselves to it physically," Barton says. Dale's Mr. Peachum is a kinetic marvel, arms, legs, and groin all doing their own syncopations. As his wife, Ana Gasteyer is the opposite, planting herself firmly center stage to deliver Mrs. Peachum's surly and cynical anthems. And Alan Cumming, playing what may well be the world's first bi Macheath, uses his slithery body as a kind of sexual weapon aimed at the universe.

The fact that the Threepenny roster includes so many big names could have made it tough sledding for a Broadway newcomer. In fact, Barton says, it made things easier. "This cast is so confident. Everyone is so individual. Everyone is so successful. There's never any tension. And they're all so super-open to my process--they all want to move."

Moving, however, is not always a good idea when you're singing. The Weill songs can be fiendishly difficult, and, says Barton, "It's easy to indulge in a movement and forget the vocalizing that has to accompany it." But when the singing and the moving were incompatible, Elliott and the music director, Kevin Stites, refused to compromise on either. "They didn't want me to alter the movement. So we just drilled it over and over," says Barton, "until the actors could do it all."

Sylviane Gold has written about theater for Newsday and The New York Times.