The Cement's Just for the Weight, Dear

One of the challenges of Threepenny is that the music is so quirky, it really is hard for the actors to learn, unless they're already familiar with it. They have to get that utterly unique Kurt Weill sound into their heads. I know that, over time, they'll settle into the songs, and they'll stop sounding so odd to them (that's already starting to happen). But that quirky music is a huge part of what makes Threepenny so beloved and so powerful.

Composer Kurt Weill wrote:

Nearly all worthwhile operatic experiments in recent years [leading up to the late 1920s] have been basically destructive in character. With The Threepenny Opera, reconstruction became possible, since it allowed us to start again from scratch. What we were aiming to create was the prototype of music theatre. With every musical work for the stage the question arises: how is music, particularly song, at all possible in the theatre? Here the question was resolved in the most primitive way possible. I had a realistic plot, so I had to set the music against it, since I do not consider music capable of realistic effects. Hence the action was either interrupted, in order to introduce music, or it was deliberately driven to a point where there was no alternative but to sing.

The piece, furthermore, presented us with the opportunity to make 'opera' the subject matter for an evening in the theatre. At the very beginning of the piece the audience is told: 'Tonight you are going to see an opera for beggars. Since this opera was intended to be as splendid as only beggars can imagine, and yet cheap enough for beggars to be able to watch, it is called The Threepenny Opera.' Thus the Act III finale is in no way a parody. Rather, the idea of opera was directly exploited as a means of resolving a conflict and thus shaping the action. Consequently it had to be presented in its purest, most pristine form.

This return to a primitive form of opera entailed a far-reaching simplification of musical language. The task was to write music that could be sung by actors, that is, by musical amateurs. At first this appeared to be a limitation. As work progressed, however, it proved to be an enormous enrichment. Only the realization of a coherent, identifiable melodic line made possible The Threepenny Opera's real achievement: the creation of a new type of musical theatre.

I love reading things like this from the writers of shows we work on. The more I can learn about what the writers intended, the better a job I'll do directing those shows and communicating the essence of each show to our actors.

Threepenny's prologue, "Mack the Knife," is all at once a pop song, a strong opening number for a stage musical, and a creepy, gothic horror story. Its music feels jaunty and innocently poppy, but also vaguely sinister. The lyric is both flippant and deeply disturbing ("The cement's just for the weight, dear."). Like "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd," it should make the audience's blood run cold. We're used to hearing it as a hipster pop song, pretty much ignoring the implications of the lyric. But look at that lyric:

Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear,
And he shows them pearly white.
Just a jackknife has Macheath, dear,
And he keeps it out of sight.

We're all so used to this lyric, thanks to Bobby Darin, Sinatra, and other singers. But think about it for a second. The very first image of the song (and the show) is how beautiful a killer shark's teeth are. Then we get to the second line, and we think, hold on, sharks don't "show" their teeth! Right. We're not really talking about sharks. We're talking about a shark-like man, a deadly predator. We're telling the audience up front, before we even start the story, that their hero for the evening is a monster – but a monster that's hard to see...

When the shark bites with his teeth, dear,
Scarlet billows start to spread.
Fancy gloves, though, wears Macheath, dear,
So there's not a trace of red.

So Mack is both murderous and classy. Nice. Now it gets specific and concrete.

On the sidewalk Sunday morning
Lies a body oozing life.
Someone's sneaking 'round the corner.
Is the someone Mack the Knife?

From a tugboat by the river
A cement bag's dropping down.
The cement's just for the weight, dear.
Bet you Mackie's back in town.

Sloppy Sadie was discovered
With a knife wound in her thigh.
And Macheath strolls down on dock street,
Looking dreamy at the sky.

The perverse fun of this song is that almost every verse introduces us to another victim. Mack has left bodies all over London! And to add to the horror, it's clear he'll never get caught...

There was rape down by the harbor.
Little Susie caused a stir,
Claiming that she'd been assaulted.
Wonder what got into her?

This is the most disturbing verse for me. First, this is the first time the song has actually mentioned rape, and the victim is "Little Susie." Sure, maybe that's a whore's nickname, but you can't help but picture a little girl. And then it gets worse – she's only "claiming" that she's been assaulted, implying that it may not be true, even though the lyric stipulates that she has indeed been raped. She "caused a stir" by reporting the crime committed against her. And the verse ends with the dismissal, the trivialization of her rape – "Wonder what got into her?" That last line stings so much because it both makes light of her attack with a dirty joke, and also implies that she wouldn't be believed if she pressed charges.

In these more aware times, as our culture grapples with the problem of rape, it's probably harder to hear that verse now than at any time in the past. Especially with the upbeat music that accompanies it.

The script includes several alternate verses you can use. We're using one that mentions several of our characters:

Sukey Tawdry, Jenny Diver,
Polly Peachum, Lucy Brown –
Oh, the line forms on the right, dear,
Now that Mackie's back in town.

That third line, "The line forms on the right, dear," tells us a lot about Mack. He's dangerous, wholly without human feelings. He's a genuine sociopath, the ultimate "bad boy," and women line up to be his lover. That's so fucked up. And the show explores that fucked-up situation through the character of Jenny, and her tortured love-hate relationship with Mack.

There's one other alternate verse that's really striking, though we won't be using it because the song would just get too long.

Big explosion at the market.
Twenty people blown to death.
In the crowd stands wide-eyed Mackie,
Only slightly out of breath.

That sounds so freakishly contemporary, as if it could be describing the Boston Marathon bombing.

The whole point of this song is that Mack's backstory, before any of the action of Threepenny Opera even begins, is that he's essentially Jack the Ripper. That's just a given, and the fact that he's a rapist and murderer hangs over the entire show, particularly anytime he's with women. The whole perverse joke of the show, the satire in its conception, is that a rapist and murderer is the hero of a romantic musical comedy.

Only Brecht. Although, now that I think about it, The Robber Bridegroom is an obvious companion piece to Threepenny, since both shows have sociopaths for heroes and rape at their centers.

Often, when I start a new show, I rewatch Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth, an old PBS series with Bill Moyers that is one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life. Six episodes that tell you everything you'll ever need to know about storytelling, religion, human culture, psychology, et al. Listening to Campbell talk about the Hero Myth, its details, its conventions, reveals to me just how deliciously fucked up The Threepenny Opera is.

You can't tell from these characters' behavior who's the protagonist and who's the antagonist, between Mack and Peachum. But you can distinguish those roles through the conventions of musical comedy, by the kind of songs they sing. After all, this isn't really an opera; it's a musical comedy, filtered through the amazing but weirdly distorted lens of Brecht and Weill.

It's a romantic musical comedy that doesn't want you emotionally involved. It's obvious Mack is never sincere, even when he's singing a love song with Polly. Everything that makes a romantic musical comedy is here but massively subverted. This is a musical comedy that refuses to end with our hero and heroine together. Brecht and Weill were searching for new ways to tell a story with music, at just about the same time that Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern were also seeking new ways to move beyond old-school musical comedy. Like Threepenny Opera, Show Boat was a musical comedy (in its form) that forced its audience to confront intensely serious social issues.

The Threepenny Opera's central theme is that people can't be heroic, can't even be humane, inside the inhumane, broken economic system of capitalism. As I type these words, Baltimore is suffering through terrible destruction at the hands of rioters, after yet another unarmed black man was killed by police. Today, thirty-five years of Republican economic policies have systematically destroyed labor unions, and as a direct result, destroyed the American middle class; and the largely Republican (and totally ineffectual) War on Drugs has put massive numbers of men of color into prison, destroying their families and communities in the process. Our world today is not far removed from the world of Threepenny.

Capitalism is not a system of morality, only a system of capital: money and labor. When morality (not to be confused with religion) is taken or kept out of our economic system (as it has been since 1980), we get Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Koch Brothers; and we get today's minimum wage of $2.13 for restaurant servers. People tend to forget that the War on Drugs was never a well thought-out policy designed to solve a problem; it began as little more than a Nixon campaign slogan, designed to terrify racist, middle-class white voters. But it created a permanent economic underclass, trapped by failed communities and oppressed by police, communities where the only viable option for many young men is crime and the drug trade. Are they that different from Filch in the show, starving on his own, till he joins up with Peachum's criminal enterprises?

The great philosopher and teacher Joseph Campbell once said of Darth Vader, "He isn't living in terms of humanity; he's living in terms of a system." And that's the crux of Threepenny, the unbalance at the heart of the story. Morality is impossible in such dire economic circumstances, Brecht is telling us. Perhaps Threepenny is a closer companion piece to Brecht's Mother Courage than we thought.

But there's even more here...

In an aggressive act of literary and cultural subversion, Brecht made Macheath, the thief, rapist, and serial polygamist, into a Christ figure. Stephen Hinton writes in "Misunderstanding The Threepenny Opera," an essay in the Cambridge Opera Handbooks: The Threepenny Opera:

The most striking irreverences in the Threepenny text concern the Bible. Sacred means are used to profane ends. 'Wake up, you corrupt Christian,' sings Mr Peachum in his opening 'Morning Hymn'. The alert listener will indeed stumble across a whole host of biblical quotations and allusions. For example: Polly's lyric, 'Anywhere you go, I will go with you' in the 'Love Song' is lifted verbatim from Ruth 1:16 ('Whither thou goest' etc.). It is first of all quoted by Mr. and Mrs. Peachum with a blasphemous 'Jonny' tacked on the end in their 'Instead Of Song,' and twice parodied by Polly when she becomes 'poetic' before the first finale, quoting the exchanges between Macheath and Brown: 'If you down another [cocktail], then I want to down another one, too' and, with lavatorial euphemism, 'If you go somewhere, then I want to go somewhere, too.'

Peachum's 'And when he asks for bread to eat, not get a stone.' in the first finale is a paraphrase of Matthew 7:9 ('Being given bread to eat and not a stone'). Macheath's fate may even be seen to parallel in its broad contours the fate of Jesus Christ. The marriage to Polly, the beginning of the story, takes place in a stable. Presents are brought, not by kings but by gangsters. Mack, like Christ, is betrayed on a Thursday and is to be executed on a Friday. Mrs. Peachum bribes Jenny, just as the Caiaphas paid Judas. Brown, like Peter, disowns his friend. In Scene 6, Mack borrows from Luke 22:61-62: 'I looked at him and he wept bitterly', adding 'I learnt the trick from the Bible.' Jesus begs forgiveness for the sins of others; Macheath for his own. Jesus is raised from the dead; Macheath reprieved by the King's Messenger. When asked by the magazine Die Dame in October 1928 about 'the strongest influence' on his work, Brecht replied: 'You'll laugh: the Bible.' He was probably being serious. Not necessarily identified as such by the audience, the biblical quotations and innuendoes nonetheless strike a familiar chord as common cliches.

The bottom line is this. Threepenny is certainly an old show, first premiering in Berlin in 1928, but it is as timely and as relevant as last night's news. This is a show that tells the truth, about then, about now, about humanity at any and all times. This is a show that pushes all our buttons to shock us into paying attention. This really is a neo musical comedy, even though it was written nearly a century ago.

This is the oldest show New Line has ever done, and it's also one of the most slyly potent. After all these years of reading about Threepenny, it is such an honor and a joy to finally work on it. I can't wait to share it with our audiences, especially those who've never seen it before...

The adventure continues.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

They Tell You That the Best in Life is Mental

God bless Amazon. I remember the first show I did after discovering Amazon was Assassins, and I found the most amazing book – American Assassins: The Darker Side of Politics by James W. Clarke, in which each character in the show gets their own mini-biography and psychoanalysis. It completely changed the way I approached the show. I had already directed the show once, pre-Amazon, and in retrospect, there was so much I didn't understand about these characters.

Now every time I start work on a new show, I stop by Amazon, and see what books or videos they have that might help me. There's always so much. When we did Bonnie & Clyde last fall, I bought a bunch of movies we know Bonnie and Clyde had seen, movies and actors we know they imitated in certain ways, so we could really get inside their distorted worldview. While working on Jerry Springer, I was reading books about daytime talk shows, Dante's Inferno, Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and a book about schadenfreude.

This time, as we launched our adventure into Threepenny, I found some really wonderful books to read, and a few very cool videos I've been watching.

I discovered early in my research that Brecht, in an effort to set in stone his characters and themes, wrote The Threepenny Novel, retelling his story with way more detail and context. I'm in middle of reading it now, and I really love it. First of all, it's a seriously valuable peek inside the brain of our bookwriter and lyricist; that's always awesome. Also, it gives me so much extra information about these characters, this world and its politics, and more than anything, an understanding that these actually aren't outrageous characters; they are realistic characters in outrageous times. Very much a comic analogue to Brecht's Mother Courage. (Which blew my mind.)

I learned from the novel that beyond what we know from the musical, Macheath also has several legitimate (or semi-legitimate) business interests, which often don't do very well. Combine that information with Mack's hyper-violent past (laid out in "Mack the Knife"), and that's one weird, fucked up character, a businessman-thief-rapist-murderer. The extra backstory and character insights I get from the novel are such a gift. Nothing is more interesting than complexity, and Mack as he existed in Brecht's imagination, was endlessly complex. No, we can't communicate all of that through the musical, but a lot of that information will make our show and our characters richer.

Probably the most valuable book I found was the Cambridge Opera Handbook: The Threepenny Opera by Stephen Hinton, a collection of essays, reports, analyses, reviews, all about Threepenny and its various productions and translations. I'm so glad I read this before I started work. I really understand the show differently from how I saw it before. Maybe more than with any other show I've worked on, Threepenny's historical and political context are inseparable from its artistic creation and intentions.

The other book I'm devouring right now is The Partnership: Brecht, Weill, Three Women, and Germany on the Brink, by Pamela Katz. Metaphorical chocolate cake for the musical theatre nerd. It's a really entertaining journey through Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's entire relationship, both personal and artistic, along with the women who profoundly influenced them. There's Elizabeth Hauptmann, who worked with Brecht on the text for Threepenny and other projects. And then there's Brecht's wife and muse, the actor Helene Weigel, who would create the role of Mother Courage; and Weill's wife and muse, the singer and actor Lotte Lenya, who would create the role of Polly Peachum, and then decades later become famous in America playing Jenny Diver. The relationships among these incredibly talented, incredibly smart, and somewhat fucked up artists are all so fascinating, and they really give me insight into why Brecht and Weill created Threepenny and what they wanted it to accomplish.

What I would give to go back in time and talk with Brecht. Although, they say he always had really bad body odor. So there's that.

Even though it probably doesn't help me in any specific way, I also wanted to learn what I could about The Beggar's Opera, which Brecht and Weill adapted into Threepenny. I started with Modern Critical Interpretations: John Gay's The Beggar's Opera by Harold Bloom. Part of the fun with this book was that all my life I've read about The Beggar's Opera, and I know it was an ancestor of sorts of our musical theatre today. But I never was that interested in exploring it. So seeing the film and reading this book really surprised me. The show does feel very 1700s in certain ways, but it's also very funny, very satiric, and quite naughty. I'm really glad I know it better now.

Connected to that, I'm also reading The Thief-Taker Hangings: How Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Wild, and Jack Sheppard Captivated London and Created the Celebrity Criminal by Aaron Skirboll. It's a really fun read, about Jonathan Wild, real-life model for Mr. Jonathan Peachum; Capt. Jack Sheppard, real-life model for Capt. Macheath; and Prime Minister Jonathan Walpole, who apparently is satirized through both characters. It's fun to see how these real people became characters in The Beggar's Opera, then characters in Threepenny.

In addition to these books, there are also some cool videos I've watched in preparation for working on this show.

As I mentioned above, I recently watched the 1950s film version of The Beggar's Opera, with Laurence Olivier as Macheath and directed by Peter Brook, based on their stage production. There are slow parts, but much of it is very funny. And it's such a revealing glimpse into our artistic past. Quite a bit of the Threepenny plot is already in place in The Beggar's Opera, but Brecht also made some major changes, not the least of which was the creation of corrupt Chief of Police Tiger Brown.

The documentary Shadows in Paradise - Hitler's Exiles in Hollywood is about the German artists who had to flee Germany as the Nazis came to power, including Brecht, Lenya, Weill, and Weigel. Understanding the cultural and artistic environment they were working in before they left Germany (when they created Threepenny) explains so much of what Threepenny is saying, as well as its tone, and its angry, fearless satire.

I had seen the documentary Theater of War before, but one of our actors had mentioned it at rehearsal, so I thought it would be worth a rewatch. It follows actors Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Austin Pendleton, director George C. Wolfe, and translator/adapter Tony Kushner, through rehearsals and performances of Brecht's Mother Courage at The Public Theater in New York. It's an extraordinary master class in what Brecht wanted from theatre, and how to do Brecht so that it is both honest and Brechtian.

After all these years of doing Brechtian shows – Cabaret, Company, Hair, Bat Boy, Urinetown, Assassins, Floyd Collins, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Man of La Mancha, Passing Strange, Bukowsical, and so many others – it's very cool, at long last, actually to be working on Threepenny itself, the show that pretty much singlehandedly changed the trajectory of the American musical theatre in the late 1950s into the early 1960s. Not all that different from how I felt about working on Rent two years ago. This has already been so much fun for me, and we're only halfway through blocking.

I love research. Funny how I never felt that way until after I was out of college...

The (very dark) adventure continues...

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. If you go to Smile.Amazon.com instead of Amazon.com to shop, the site will ask you to name a charity, and then for most things you buy, the charity (like New Line, for example, hint, hint) gets a small cut.

Threepenny!

Sometimes we start work on a show and I feel like we're stepping into some vast, rushing river of theatrical history. When we produced Marc Blitzstein's 1937 labor musical The Cradle Will Rock, we recreated that historic opening night, when the federal government tried to shut them down, the unions forbade the actors from appearing onstage, and so the cast performed the entire show out in the audience. Sometimes I feel this deep obligation to history, to get it right, to keep passing the torch. I felt the same way when we produced The Nervous Set, Hair, Rocky Horror, Jacques Brel, and even Rent.

But no show we've ever produced has a history to compare with The Threepenny Opera (originally titled Scum, it also later had the subtitle, The Pimps' Opera), with music by the great composer Kurt Weill, and book and lyrics by the genius writer and director Bertolt Brecht.

It all started way back in 1728, when Englishman John Gay wrote the ballad opera The Beggar's Opera, a satirical comedy about corruption in London society, featuring many of the characters who would later appear in Threepenny. According to Richard Traubner's Operetta: A Theatrical History, the original idea for the opera came from Jonathan Swift, who wrote to Alexander Pope in 1716, asking "...what think you, of a Newgate pastoral among the thieves and whores there?" Newgate (pronounced nu-git) was London's central prison.

Their friend John Gay decided that it should be a satire rather than a pastoral opera, and based his central characters on real people – the notorious criminals Jonathan Wild and Jack Sheppard became Jonathan Peachum and Capt. Macheath. In fact, it seems Peachum is really a mix of Wild and the pompous, long-serving prime minister Robert Walpole.

The story satirized politics, poverty and injustice, and everyday corruption at all levels of society. But The Beggar's Opera is really more romantic comedy, laced with social commentary; while its descendant The Threepenny Opera is social commentary, laced with romantic comedy. (Laurence Olivier made a pretty decent film version of The Beggar's Opera in the 1950s, which is now on commercial video.) Gay later wrote a sequel for Polly, set in the West Indies. The Beggar's Opera continued to be revived for the next 200+ years.

In 1920, yet another revival of The Beggar's Opera opened in London, and ran an impressive 1,463 performances, becoming a certified hit; then it played Austria, where it caught the attention of Bertolt Brecht.

Brecht began to co-write with Elizabeth Hauptmann a new, contemporary, sociopolitical, satirically savage updating of the show called The Three-Penny Opera, with a dark, groundbreaking, jazz score by Kurt Weill (pronounced Wile by Weill himself, but usually pronounced Vile by others). Cultural historian Stanley Crouch has said that artists who want to express adult emotions, who want to move beyond adolescent emotions, use jazz. Musical theatre historian Cecil Smith later wrote, "It proves that a small musical show can be both engrossing and magnificently entertaining without sacrificing high imagination, acute intelligence, superbly unified and thoroughly artistic production, and an underlying sense of purpose."

(An interesting side note: Elisabeth Hauptmann was originally listed as co-author of The Threepenny Opera, having purportedly written the majority of the text, and also having translated the English text of The Beggar's Opera into German for Brecht and Weill to work on. But she gets virtually no credit today.)

Stephen Hinton writes in Misunderstanding The Threepenny Opera, "Weill conceived Die Dreigroschenoper as a work of experiment and reform. To use his term, it is a Zwischengattung, an 'in-between genre,' systematically between existing genres, historically a stepping-stone in a development toward a new type of musical theatre. . . It is not so much opera as opera about opera." In other words, it's a meta-musical, like many of the shows it later inspired. Hinton writes about, "Weill's implicit flouting of the traditions of nineteenth-century opera and music-drama. This is not full-scale, grand opera, but a cheap 'threepenny' version. The old grand operatic form is suppressed by [art song], cabaret song, and ballad."

Exactly what Bat Boy and Urinetown did.

Certainly, Three-Penny was a lot more adult than much of what had come before it. The show opened at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in August 1928. It was such a hit, additional companies were opened in Vienna, Budapest, Frankfurt, and Hamburg.

Bertolt Brecht was already forging a new kind of theatre in the early part of the twentieth century. He didn't like the way most plays involved their audiences emotionally but not intellectually. Audiences laughed and cried but never thought about what was happening in the story. He wanted to create a theatre of ideas, a theatre of issues, and in order to encourage an audience’s intellectual involvement, he began to develop ways to continually remind the audience that they were in a theatre, to keep them from being too swept away by the story, to keep them from getting "lost" in the fictional reality that most other theatre writers strove to create and maintain.

Brecht would have actors step out of scenes to talk directly to the audience, and he would use songs that commented on what had just happened or was about to happen (again addressing the audience directly), rather than using only songs that sprang organically from the action. Today, this idea is not so revolutionary but when Brecht began to make theatre this way, it was bizarre. Today, concept musicals like Company, Follies, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Chicago, Evita, Assassins, Rent, Bat Boy, Urinetown, The Wild Party, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, American Idiot, and perhaps most of all, Sweeney Todd, are all extremely Brechtian in their construction and style.

When the mid-50s revival of Threepenny opened in London, critic Kenneth Tynan wrote, "A Brechtian, let me explain, is one who believes that low drama with high principles is better than high principles with no audience, that the worst plays are those which depend wholly on suspense and the illusion of reality; and that the drama of the future will be a wedding in which neither partner marries beneath itself."

Dark, aggressive, and unrelenting in its social commentary, The Three-Penny Opera was a political satire for a new age and for a Germany on the brink of fascism and Nazism. The show also found success touring Europe, playing an estimated 10,000 performances over five years.

One of Germany's premier theatre critics, Herbert Jhering wrote in the Berliner Borsen-Courier:

The success of the Dreigroschenoper cannot be rated too highly. It represents the breakthrough into the public sphere of a type of theatre that is not oriented towards chic society. Not because beggars and burglars appear in it, without a thriller emerging, nor because a threatening underworld is in evidence which disregards all social ties. It is because the tone has been found that neither opposes nor negates morality, which does not attack norms but transcends them and which, apart from the travesty of the operatic model at the end, is neither parodic nor serious. Rather, it proclaims a different world in which the barriers between tragedy and humour have been erased. It is the triumph of open form.

Sounds a lot like Jerry Springer the Opera. The critic of Der Tag wrote:

Most important is what the thing as a whole attempts: to create from the dissolution of traditional theatrical categories something new that is all things at once: irony and symbol, grotesque and protest, opera and popular melody; an attempt which gives subversion the last word and which, leaving its theatrical claims aside, could represent an important phase in the otherwise directionless discussion about the form of the revue.

A decade later, Weill's music publisher would write to him, "In certain private circles during the Nazi period, the songs of Die Dreigroschenoper were a kind of anthem and served as spiritual rejuvenation for many an oppressed soul." The show's opening song, "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" ("The Ballad of Mack the Knife") was based on a song form called "moritaten," literally, murder-deed song. It soon became the most popular song in Europe.

A German film version was made, Die 3groschenoper, by Georg Wilhelm Pabst and starring original cast member Lotte Lenya (the original Polly, the wife of the composer and, not incidentally, a former prostitute) as the whore Jenny. The film was an interesting preservation of the piece but not a great film, disjointed, too stagey for film and too filmic to be just a recording of the stage play, it ended up wandering somewhere in the middle. Still, some considered it a masterpiece and the German government thought it might be good anti-capitalist propaganda.

The film version's editor, Jean Oser, said in an interview, “Three-Penny Opera was a very hot property at the time: it had come out as a big theatrical hit; in fact in was almost phenomenal how much it influenced a complete generation. It formed the entire pre-Hitler generation until 1933; for about five years every girl in the country wanted to marry a man like Mackie. Apparently, the ideal man was a pimp.” The French made a film version, L’Opéra de Quat’Sous, filmed at the same time as the German film and on the same sets.

In 1933, Weill and Lenya were tipped off that they were on a list of Jewish intellectuals about to be arrested by the Gestapo. They escaped to Paris, and then to the U.S. Meanwhile, Hitler decided that Three-Penny was an attack on wholesome German family values and it was banned. In Hitler’s Museum of Degenerate Art (no kidding!), one room played songs from Three-Penny on an endless loop so that wholesome Germans could be outraged by them. But so many people came to listen to the great songs that the exhibit was hastily closed down.

The stage version of Threepenny (the hyphen now gone) was mounted in a total of 130 international productions already by 1933, when the show came to New York in a reproduction staging by Francesco von Mendelssohn. But New York was not yet ready for Brecht and it ran only twelve performances on Broadway. Critic Robert Garland wrote in The New York World Telegram, "A rebel of an operetta, it walks boldly and bitterly through the autumn in which we all reside, kicking up the leaves and applying lighted matches where lighted matches are sure to do the greatest harm. The trouble is that it does not laugh as it is doing so ... You'll know what I mean when I say that The 3-Penny Opera is as humorless as Hitler." Wow. No wonder it ran 12 performances!

Director Brian Kulick says, “America didn't fully understand Brecht's black humor until Vietnam and Watergate, and in a way we've caught up with his humor. It was always there, but we couldn't hear it. His ironic, one might say cynical, outlook just didn't fit with a Rodgers and Hammerstein world. And now, post all these horrible things that have happened in the twentieth century, we've learned how to laugh the way Brecht laughed.”

The show did better in Paris in 1937, in London in 1940, and in Milan in 1956. Desmond Vesey’s English translation of the show was preformed in America in 1945 and 1948, and later in a dual translation with Eric Bentley.

In 1934, fearing that his show would be misunderstood, Brecht wrote The Threepenny Novel, in which he expanded on his central themes, and gave us way more backstory of all the main characters. It's a fun read. Brecht also continued to tinker with his show, making its satire, sharper, nastier, more truthful.

After Kurt Weill’s death in 1950, fellow composer and lyricist Marc Blitzstein (who had written book, music, and lyrics for the very Brechtian The Cradle Will Rock, which he had dedicated to Brecht) decided to write a new translation of The Threepenny Opera. He had already worked on a few isolated songs from the score. With some strong nudging, Lotte Lenya agreed to allow a new production of Blitzstein’s translation. But they wanted her to recreate her original role of Polly Peachum, and at age fifty-five, she didn't think she could pull it off. Eventually she agreed to play Jenny again, and she became the cast’s stylistic advisor, teaching them Weill’s special style of speak-singing (sprechstimme), talking about the original production, about Weill and Brecht’s original intentions, and more.

The new Threepenny, directed by Carmen Capalbo, opened at the Theatre de Lys off Broadway in March 1954, using New York’s first thrust stage. Fifties Commie Hunter, Senator Joseph McCarthy, called Threepenny "a piece of anti-capitalist propaganda which exalts anarchical gangsterism and prostitutes over democratic law and order." Then the show was kicked out of the theatre after twelve weeks because of a prior booking. The public clamored for its return and so, a few months later, it came back to off Broadway in September 1955, and it ran 2,706 performances and six years, becoming the first off Broadway mega-hit, and causing a sea change in the philosophy of serious musical theatre in America.

Lotte Lenya won the 1956 Tony for her performance in Threepenny, even though the show ran off Broadway. The show itself was also given a Special Tony for "Distinguished Off Broadway Production."

Before his death, Brecht read Blitzstein's translation and called it "magnificent." Weill's widow Lotte Lenya mentioned in a letter to a colleague, "the admiration I have for [Blitzstein's] work and my feeling that no other exiting version gives a hint of Brecht's poetry and power." Hans Heinsheimer, head of the opera division at Universal Edition music publishers, said, "Marc Blitzstein's English adaptation was so true to Bert Brecht's German original that we are hearing essentially the same piece that had taken Germany by storm twenty-four years earlier."

Kim H. Kowalke writes in the Threepenny edition of the Cambridge Opera Handbooks series, "All in all, the final version of Blitzstein's adaptation followed Brecht's script more literally than it did Weill's score. Although he had softened the tone of the original language in a number of places, made a few judicious cuts in the dialogue (the first preview still lasted nearly four hours), reordered some passages, and reinstated Gay's opening to the brothel scene, Blitzstein's script undermines the sense and shape of the 1928 libretto less obviously than does Brecht's own literary version published in 1931 – the 'authorized' text, now often mistaken as the historically 'authentic' one."

Blitzstein's translation also gave the world one of its greatest pop hits, "Mack the Knife." Unfortunately, stage censorship at the time prevented Blitzstein from being entirely faithful to the Brecht. Blitzstein’s version was also produced in London in 1956, and around the world since then, becoming the preferred translation. By the time it closed off Broadway, it had run longer than the longest-running Broadway musical at the time, Oklahoma! The Threepenny cast album had sold 500,000 copies, and "Mack the Knife" had forty different pop recordings, that had collectively sold over ten million copies.

In 1962 a lifeless, English-language film version was made called The Three Penny Opera (each version seems to have its own spacing and punctuation). In desperation, the producers tacked on a new, cheaply made opening to the film, in which Sammy Davis Jr. sang "Mack the Knife," and then they sold the film as "starring" Davis.

Back in Germany, Brecht's Berliner Ensemble finally added Threepenny to its repertoire in 1960, four years after its playwright's death. Director Erich Engel wrote about why he revived the show, "Today, as before, it is useful, by way of consciousness raising, to utilize such a satire in order to submit to the viewer's critique the adulteration of life under capitalism."

Threepenny would return to New York in 1976, starring Raul Julia, in a much grittier translation – free of 1950s censorship – for another 306 performances. Since that production, directors tend to cast "sexy" Macheaths, but that wasn't what was intended. As Brecht himself wrote about his anti-hero, "He impresses women less as a handsome man than as a well-heeled one. There are English drawings of The Beggar's Opera which show a short, stocky man of about forty with a head like a radish, a bit bald but not lacking dignity."

An excellent 1989 film version, Mack the Knife, starring Raul Julia, rock singer Roger Daltry, Richard Harris, and Julie Waters didn't do well either, but in many ways, this version was closer to Brecht’s philosophy and theories on theatre, and his famous distancing effect. There have been other high-profile revivals, one with Sting, one with Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper, but they weren't particularly successful.

Threepenny is like Show Boat, in that there isn't just one authentic or "correct" version. Brecht himself rewrote the show over time, changing its tone and the prominence of its politics after its first production. There are four translations available for production, from various sources, and they differ quite a bit.

Once New Line announced last season that we were producing Threepenny, the show's fans all wanted to know which translation we'd be using – and they all have their favorite. So why do the Blitzstein translation? Because though some may think it's not as faithful to Brecht's German lyrics as other versions (though Brecht and Lenya disagreed), I think Blitzstein's translation works the best as theatre and as storytelling. I think his lyrics are the most singable. Some of the other translations are dirtier, more adult, and in certain ways perhaps more faithful to the original, but the other translations all sound like translations to me. Blitzstein's doesn't.

Plus, I think audiences want to hear the famous lyrics they all (partially) know to "Mack the Knife." One translation of the show moves this song to the opening of Act II, which I hate.

I've seen Threepenny onstage three times, all amateur, and I've loved it every time. Though in talking to people who've seen other productions over the years, apparently a lot of directors don't seem to know this is a comedy. I'm not sure how that's possible, but I've heard of many productions that just weren't at all funny.

Believe me, with the cast we've assembled, there's no way that will happen to New Line.

Still, there is this weight of history on my shoulders. I know there is a vast, unknown army of Threepenny fans. I know a lot of people love this show deeply. But really, all we have to do is the same thing we do with every show – just follow the text and go where the writers take us. People often ask me about a given show, "So what's your concept for it?" My concept is the clearest storytelling we can muster. That's all.

This is going to be such a fun rehearsal process, and we're going to have such a blast sharing this with our audiences.

Another great adventure begins...!

Long Live the Musical!
Scott