The Seven Deadly Sins, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's 1933 "Opera-Ballet," is dusted off and given new life by co-producers Scottish Opera and Company Chordelia. Credit for the successful revival of this period piece must go to director Kally Lloyd-Jones and designer Janis Hart, who have figured out a way to make everything that happens on stage look not only fresh and appealing but pertinent to our times.
Brecht's prickly story has a split personality. On one side of the stage, we see a Depression-Era family of itinerant farmers scraping out a living "beside the Mississippi in Louisiana." The dream of these dirt-poor, Bible-spouting folk is to own their own house. Since neither the mother (David Morrison in a granny dress) nor the father (Iain Paton), nor the two brothers (Damian Thantrey, Peter Van Hulle) can find a decent job, they decide to send Ana, the only girl in the family, out into the world to earn money for them. Ana has two sides to her. Ana I (the show-stealing Nadine Livingston) is cynical, greedy and conniving. Ana II (the dancer Kirsty Pollock) is beautiful, naive and pliant.
Commenting all the while on this topsy-turvy morality tale is Weill's music, which makes liberal use of American pop tunes and gospel hymns, always with his trademark dissonance and caustic humor. Backed up by a full orchestra and resplendent production values, Seven Deadly Sins packs a surprisingly powerful wallop for such a short, seemingly-dated work. 
