The Threepenny Opera

Not an opera nor exactly a piece of musical theatre, but a cutting, cynical, and often grimly funny satire – with lots of songs, including such cabaret classics as “Mac the Knife” and “Pirate Jenny.” Brecht, with a lot of help from Elisabeth Hauptmann, wrote the script in a few frantic weeks in 1928 Berlin, a city that was simultaneously reinventing modern gender relations and witnessing the excesses of turbocapitalism, and the play, with its raw and edgy score by Weill, preserves that helter-skelter atmosphere. A wild, merciless, utterly captivating ride!