The ThreePenny Opera
Book & Lyrics by Bertolt Brecht/Music by Kurt Weill
English Adaptation by Marc Blitzstein
Directed by Xerxes Mehta
Musical Direction by: David Smith
Set/Costume Design: Elena Zlotescu
Light Design: Terry Cobb
Orchestra Conductor: Jari Villanueva
Choreographer: Doug Hamby
Dialect Direction: Lynn Watson
Fight Direction: Casey Kaleba
The departments of Theatre and Music jointly present one of the ground-breaking music-theatre works of the
twentieth century,
The Threepenny Opera. With music by Kurt Weill and text and lyrics by Bertolt Brecht,
this cheerfully vicious satire of corruption and greed in the Weimar Republic set box-office records at its
original Berlin run (1928-1933), from where it quickly spread to become a popular hit throughout the Western
world. Weill’s jazz-inflected score, which includes such now-famous songs as “Mack the Knife,” “Pirate Jenny,”
and the “Solomon Song,” deeply influenced both classical and popular music composers and, in effect, expanded
the idiom of music-theatre as a form.
Threepenny is performed here in the English version by Marc Blitzstein.
