Our book discussion may include references and comparisons to this performance. If you enjoy the plays of Bertolt Brecht, be sure to see PlayMakers Repertory Company’s production of Life of Galileo, which runs from February 27 – March 17. ***This Great Books session will meet on Wednesday mornings instead of Tuesday mornings.*** The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper di danop) is a 'play with music' by Bertolt Brecht, adapted from a translation by Elisabeth Hauptmann of John Gay's 18th-century English ballad opera, The Beggar's Opera, and four ballads by Franois Villon, with music by Kurt Weill. The Threepenny Opera Fri 18 Sun 20 Aug Event information. “ Brutal, scandalous, perverted, yet humorous, hummable, and with a happy ending-Bertolt Brecht’s revolutionary masterpiece The Threepenny Opera is a landmark of modern drama that has become embedded in the Western cultural imagination.“-Biblio, Inc. The work, by playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950), was first performed in its original German as Die Dreigroschenoper at. With Kurt Weill’s unforgettable music – one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz to the theatre – it became a popular hit throughout the western world.”-Vintage Press

“Based on John Gay’s eighteenth-century Beggar’s Opera, The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho.

“One of the most important works in the history of musical theater.”.

Weiler, Teaching Assistant Professor of German

Brecht the threepenny opera