The Threepenny Opera

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's scabrous musical, a cynical Weimar update of John Gay's 1728 satire The Beggar's Opera, returns in a new production by Germany's Berliner Ensemble, which mounted the original version in 1928. The show still centers on the charismatic killer and lothario Macheath—known as Mackie Messer ("Mack the Knife")—but Barrie Kosky's staging, on a geometrical set by Rebecca Ringst, is far from traditional the production makes numerous trims and changes to the notoriously unwieldy script by Brecht and his finally credited collaborator, Elisabeth Hauptmann. Performances are in the original German, with English titles.