But topical jokes about fat-cat bankers, competitive belching sequences and jaunty musical paeans to anal sex are new additions. The cheerfully sour portraits of pimps, prostitutes and sleazy urban predators remain from the original. In 2016, of course, this is more promise than warning.Ĭonceived by Brecht and Weill in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptman, The Threepenny Opera may have since been overtaken by Cabaret and Sweeney Todd in the premiere league of debauched musicals, but Norris and his adapter Simon Stephens ( The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time) have worked hard to rediscover its bracingly vulgar spirit.
“Contains filthy language and immoral behavior” runs the cautionary tagline on this swashbuckling new revival from the National Theatre’s artistic director Rufus Norris. A heady cocktail of Dickensian London squalor and jazz-age Berlin decadence, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 musical drama The Threepenny Opera has proved endlessly adaptable in its nine-decade life.