THE THREEPENNY OPERA
by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill

Directed by Joseph Gilg
and Patrick Torelle
Nov 9 - 11 and 15 - 16
produced with and performed at
Lane Community College

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 tells the story of the street criminal “Mack the Knife” Macheath and his involvement with Polly, the virtuous daughter of a fellow street criminal, Peachum.


Betrayed by his own sexual desires and by the women with whom he indulges them, Macheath is sentenced to be executed, but he is saved from the hangman's noose by a sudden twist of fate. With Kurt Weill's music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz into the theater, it became and has stayed a popular hit throughout the Western world.