"The Threepenny Opera"
book and lyrics by Bertolt Becht, music by Kurt Weill

Synopsis: The Threepenny Opera was Brecht's first and greatest commercial success, and it remains one of his best-loved and most-performed plays. Based on John Gay's eighteenth-century Beggar's Opera, the play is set in Victorian England's Soho but satirizes the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic through its wry love story of Polly Peachum and "Mack the Knife" Macheath. With Kurt Weill's music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz into the theater, it became a popular hit throughout the Western world.

About the Writers:

Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, in 1898 and left Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power. He lived in the United States for seven years, settling with his family in Santa Monica and New York and continuing to work on plays and films. After the war Brecht returned to Germany where he found the Berliner Ensemble. He died in 1956. See "St. Joan of the Stockyards" for more info on Brecht.

The sounds of Kurt Weill--a fusion of opera, folk, and jazz idioms--could only have been created by a composer equally at home in the concert hall or cabaret. "I have never acknowledged the difference between 'serious' music and 'light' music," he once told an interviewer. "There is only good music and bad music." As championed by his widow and muse, Lotte Lenya, his oeuvre underwent a renaissance in the midfifties: This was a time when The Threepenny Opera played to sold-out crowds in the Village; the strains of Bobby Darin's hit "Mack the Knife" emanated from every jukebox and car radio; and live, televised "spectaculars" of One Touch of Venus and Lady in the Dark lit up sets from coast to coast. In the succeeding years, an astonishing array of performers, from Louis Armstrong to Lou Reed, Teresa Stratas to Ute Lemper, have kept his music in the popular vernacular.