This adaptation sets Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera in present day New York City against the backdrop of a Mayoral Inauguration. Themes of immigration abuse and class warfare burn beneath a vaudevillian veneer of riotous Brechtian comedy.
In a time of mounting fascism and eroding free speech, the theatre must respond with radicalizing storytelling so vivid, so absorbing and so immediate that one is activated to participate in their daily citizenship. Brecht created Threepenny Opera in a time of upheaval and moral rot to expose the dark figures manipulating our society from the shadows. We find ourselves in a scarily similar time to those same days a hundred years ago. There is no better template than Threepenny Opera, no better tool than Brecht's perspective-bending comedy, to explore the warning signs of a nation's decline, a nation that aches to be unified. Macheath is once again at hand, this time much more indelicate, much more out in the open and seducing us ever so slowly with one last punchline.
