Threepenny Opera

Lyrics written by Bertold Brecht. Music written by Kurt Weill.
Principal cast includes: Lotte Lenya (Jenny); Bea Arthur (Lucy Brown); Charlotte Rae (Mrs. Peachum); Jo Sullivan (Polly Peachum); Scott Merrill (Macheath "Mack The Knife"); Martin Wolfson (Mr. J.J. Peachum); Gerald Price (The Streetsinger); George Tyne (Tiger Brown).
Recorded in New York, New York in April 1954. Originally released on M-G-M (E/SE 3221). Includes liner notes by David Farneth.
All tracks have been digitally remastered.
Liner Note Author: Stanley Green.
Recording information: Theatre de Lys, Greenwich Village, NY (03/10/1954).
Photographer: Gene Cook.
Die Dreigroschenoper, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's radical reinterpretation of John Gay's 18th century operetta The Beggar's Opera, was a sensation in Europe after its German premiere in 1928. But the show, with its decadent portrait of the underworld, was less appealing to Americans when it appeared as The Threepenny Opera on Broadway in 1933 and became a quick flop. It took another 21 years and a new English adaptation by Marc Blitzstein for The Threepenny Opera to succeed in New York. Playing at a small Greenwich Village theater, the new version ran 2,611 performances (longer than any Broadway musical up to that time), meanwhile establishing off-Broadway as a legitimate extension of the theater. The cast album, the first such recording ever made of an off-Broadway show, suggests what it was that packed them in downtown. The music is played by an eight-piece band -- keyboards, two clarinets, two trumpets, trombone, percussion, and banjo or guitar -- making for spare arrangements that support the heavily literate songs in which Brecht comments sardonically on the world. The cast is led by a strong Polly Peachum, sung by soprano Jo Sullivan, and by Lotte Lenya (Weill's widow) in the role of Jenny Towler, here given the revenge fantasy "Pirate Jenny." Gerald Price confidently handles "The Ballad of Mack the Knife," soon to become a surprising pop hit. ~ William Ruhlmann