In the second set Vik and performance corps are joined by Ashens and chamber orchestra in a faithfully-researched and staged re-creation of Brecht and Weill’s final collaboration, The Seven Deadly Sins as premiered by George Balanchine’s short-lived dance company, Les Ballets in June 1933 in Paris (as Les sept péchés capitaux ) and London (as Anna-Anna ) with Weill’s wife Lotte Lenya and Austrian dancer Tilly Losch together in the role of the protagonist Anna, a young woman from Louisiana sent away by her parents for seven years to earn money for a new family house. Robert Ashens conducts, William Hulings directs, Caitlin Christopher choreographs; the setting is realized by Connie Huston and costumes are executed by Jamie Parker. Sara Stockwell assumes the role of Anna II alongside Vik’s Anna I, who are together supported by vocalists William Hulings, Dylan Stasack, Cloud Pemble, Alex Mentzel, and dancers Jim Ballard, Adam Kelly, Kenady Conforth and Abigail Howell. It will be performed in the English translation of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman.

Mounting a production of Weill’s and Brecht’s unusual “sung ballet” that is reoriented to the piece’s original 1933 intellectual context and philosophical timbre has been a long-standing dream for artistic director Siri Vik, a Weill scholar, and Shedd executive director and producer Jim Ralph, a lifelong admirer of Brecht. The Seven Deadly Sins has become a staple of ballet, opera and the classical music world in the sixty years since it was pulled from obscurity by Balanchine in 1958 and set on his New York City Ballet. But while the many re-creations of the 40-minute work over those decades (both as a ballet in the mold of Balanchine’s re-visioning and as a concert piece) have made The Seven Deadly Sins an oft-performed cultural mainstay, the process served Weill’s superb score well but has dulled its essential Brechtian worldview at the base of the original biting critique of capitalism and its capacity to destroy the human spirit, a socio-political morality play which turned the 4th century Christian teaching of the desert fathers on its head in order to expose the soul-draining effects of the modern socio-economic order as it existed for the petit bourgeoisie of which the ballet’s heroine, Anna, is a part. It is with great pride that The Shedd presents our attempt to restore to the piece, as much as is possible, “the hammer” of its original telling, as re-created with sensitivity and brilliance by Vik and her creative team.