Full Cast, Creative Team Set for L.A. Opera’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny with McDonald and LuPone

Full casting has been announced for the L.A. Opera’s production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, to run seven performances between February 10 and March 4 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The production will be directed by Tony Award winner John Doyle, with music direction by James Conlon.

As previously announced, Tony Award winners Audra McDonald and Patti LuPone will star; they will play Jenny Smith and Leocadia Begbick, respectively. The cast will also feature Anthony Dean Griffey as Jimmy MacIntyre, Robert Wörle as Fatty the Bookkeeper, John Easterlin as Jack O’Brien, Mel Ulrich as Bank Account Bill, Donnie Ray Albert as Trinity Moses, Derek Taylor as Toby Higgins, and Steven Humes as Alaska Wolf Joe. Catherine Ireland, Karen Vuong, Rena Harms, Natasha Flores, Sharmay Muscacchio, and Priti Gandhi will be featured as the Maidens of Mahagonny.

The show’s creative team will include Mark Bailey (sets), Ann Hould-Ward (costumes), Thomas C. Hase (lighting), and Dan Moses Schreier (sound). Doyle won the 2006 Tony Award for Sweeney Todd and is currently represented on Broadway with Company.

The opera is based on a shorter music-theater piece called the “Mahagonny Songspiel,” a song setting of loosely linked poems by Brecht about a fictional U.S. city devoted to life’s illicit pleasures, where anything goes and the only crime is to run out of money. The opera premiered in Germany in 1930.