Program
Playwright Bertolt Brecht
Composer Kurt Weill
Director Nina Vorobyeva
Set Designer Asya Mukhina
Lighting Designer Ruslan Mayorov
Choreographer Anna Garafeeva
Conductor Ilya Gaisin
Performers:
Guest artists
musicAeterna Orchestra and Choir
Details
To be honest, this story can only truly be told with jazz. It is poetic from beginning to end. It starts in cigar smoke, to the sound of laughter, and ends in death.
— Bertolt Brecht
Macheath, a bandit nicknamed “The Knife,” whose status in the criminal world is similar to that of the Godfather, decides to go legal and become a respectable member of society. To do so, he marries a bride who seemed suitable to him. However, his newly acquired father-in-law not only sends him to prison, but also leads him to the gallows.
Or:
Macheath, a bandit nicknamed “The Knife,” with the temperament and charm of Don Juan and as many wives as Bluebeard, has finally found true love — but because of the betrayal of a jealous lover, with whom he still has ties, he ends up on the scaffold.
Or:
Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, the king of the beggars, wants to marry off his daughter to save himself from ruin — but finds out she has already secretly married a bandit. Now, to save the family, he must go to extremes, even if it means sacrificing his daughter’s happiness.
Today, this is not just a story about bandits. It is a full-fledged myth, equal to the timeless plots of Shakespeare and Sophocles, and the world of London’s criminal underworld is merely the setting where the story unfolds. The creators and the audience inevitably sympathize with each character in the play, constantly shifting their perspective. The sweet, refined, and fierce music of Kurt Weill — his deconstructed cabaret — gives the story the feeling of a mad celebration, a feast during the plague.
The new production of The Threepenny Opera will be a kind of mirror reflection of the opening of the Diaghilev Festival — a concert-performance of opera and oratorio arias by George Frideric Handel. Almost a hundred years ago, in 1928, Brecht and Weill based their show on the legendary English Beggar’s Opera, which was created a century earlier, in 1727, as a parody of Handel’s operas.