James makes his role debut as Fatty the Bookkeeper in Weill’s iconic opera, reunited with Alejo Perez (GerMANIA 2018) in Ivo van Hove’s production.

Kurt Weill's jazzy opera tells the story of a trap town where pleasure counts as the only law. What seems like paradise quickly turns into hell.

Socially relevant musical theatre for one's own time – this was Kurt Weill's aim when he composed Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny. Out of the blue, three criminals on the run establish a new city, Mahagonny, a 'trap of a city' that thoroughly exploits humanity's vices and lust for pleasure, accumulating a fortune in the process. Gradually this paradise of consumption turns into a hell in which pleasure and lust form the only moral law and where everything is permitted as long as you pay. For Ivo van Hove, director of a new production of Mahagonny, the jazzy opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht is more urgently relevant than ever. In a clean visual style, which focuses on the unclear boundary between the real and the virtual, he traces a link between the social crisis of the late 1920s and today. Van Hove: "We live in a time when divisions have never been so great. We are witnessing a new class struggle."

For more information please visit:

https://www.operaballet.be/en/programme/season-2022-2023/aufstieg-und-fall-der-stadt-mahagonny