LA Opera presents Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Broadway Legends Audra McDonald and Patti LuPone headline the cast, directed by Tony Award-winner John Doyle.
Weill and Brecht, creators of the 1928 smash hit The Threepenny Opera, based Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny 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 full-length piece, an edgy and lyrical satire told in a highly entertaining blend of opera and raucous music hall songs, received its premiere in Leipzig, Germany, in 1930. The score, featuring the classic song “Moon of Alabama,” creates a vivid picture of determination, desperation. and debauchery.
Schedule:
Evening performances are February 10, 14, 17, 22 and March 1 at 7:30pm
Sunday matinee performances are February 25 and March 4 at 2:00pm