Musicals Taught Me Everything I Know

This week we chat with Matthew Caffoe of Mashed Theatre about which of life's truths can be gleaned from Berthold Brecht’s many-times-adapted classic musical/opera - The Threepenny Opera!

According to critic and musicologist Hans Keller, the work is "the weightiest possible lowbrow opera for highbrows and the most full-blooded highbrow musical for lowbrows".

The Weill authority Stephen Hinton notes that "generic ambiguity is a key to the work’s enduring success", and points out the work's deliberate hybrid status:

For Weill [The Threepenny Opera] was not just ‘the most consistent reaction to [Richard] Wagner’; it also marked a positive step towards an operatic reform. By explicitly and implicitly shunning the more earnest traditions of the opera house, Weill created a mixed form which incorporated spoken theatre and popular musical idioms. Parody of operatic convention – of Romantic lyricism and happy endings – constitutes a central device.

- FURTHER READING -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Threepenny_Opera

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertolt_Brecht

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beggar%27s_Opera

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Villon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Weill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mack_the_Knife

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Keeps_Mankind_Alive%3F

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021818/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055932/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6846238/

https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-threepenny-opera-original-cast/185978358

https://open.spotify.com/album/5M2MsnDwIWbaCXSxPw4Ocx

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Our theme song and interstitial music all by the one and only Benedict Braxton Smith. Find out more about him at www.benedictbraxtonsmith.com

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