When The Threepenny Opera opened in Berlin in 1928, it was an
immediate and outrageous success, breaking box-office records
for the next five years. The play was outrageous because
Brecht and Weill deliberately violated the polite conventions
of both opera and the popular musical. Threepenny challenged
its audience: here was musical theater--in harmonies, rhythms
and lyrics a new form for the 20th century. The play also
violated the "polite" assumptions of a society that had fallen
too much in love with its own materialism. Hitler banned
The Threepenny Opera in 1933. -
In the play Macheath sings, "The bulging pocket makes the
easy life." A question for audiences, in 1933 and today: Is
this true?

Walter Harp
Berklee Faculty

 

SYNOPSIS
ACT ONE
Prologue: A street, Soho. 4
Scene 1: Peachum's Beggars' Outfit Shop.
Scene 23 An Empty Stable.
Scene 3: Peachum's Beggars' Outfit Shop.
ACT TWO
Scene 1: The Stable.
Interlude: A street.
Scene 2: A Brothel in Wapping.
Scene 3: Newgate Prison.
ACT THREE
Scene 1: Peachum's Beggars' Outfit Shop
Interlude: A street.
Scene 2: Newgate Prison Death-Cell.

London, re-arranged in Brecht's imagination.