Middlebury Community Players holds auditions for Brecht’s/Weill’s The Threepenny Opera
Auditions:
Thursday, January 10th 7:00 p.m. Middlebury College, Axinn 229
Saturday, January 12th 2:00 p.m., Middlebury Town Hall Theater
Callbacks: Sunday, January 13th 2:00 p.m., Middlebury Town Hall Theater
A staple in Central Vermont’s musical theater landscape, Middlebury Community Players will branch out of the American canon to produce the most successful musical to have come out of Germany, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera. Performed over 10,000 times since its Berlin premier in 1928, Brecht’s reworking of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera from 1728 mixes gangster comedy with an ardent criticism of early 20th century capitalism. Mr. Peachum, head of an “army” of professional beggars whom he exploits systematically, goes up against Captain Macheath, alias Mac the Knife, leader of a group of gangsters who pillage the homes of London’s wealthy at night. Peachum and Macheath no longer need to get their own hands dirty since they have mastered the art of delegating crime, but their rivalry becomes more concrete when Peachum’s daughter Polly decides to marry the charismatic Macheath. Such a transgression of property laws needs punishment, Peachum decides, and he mobilizes every connection he has to have his undesired son-in-law caught and hanged.
Written and performed a year before the world’s most dramatic economic crisis,The Threepenny Opera is still a play to make us ponder the relationship between capital, power, gender, and society. Yet, Brecht’s dramaturgical mastery, his sense of timing, his excessively funny dialogues, and especially Kurt Weill’s jazz-inspired music (“Mac the Knife” being the most famous) make The Threepenny Opera wildly fascinating and entertaining.
The show will be fully staged in April 2013 at Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater. For audition or production information, visit
www.middleburycommunityplayers.org or contact director/producer Bettina Matthias (
bmatthia@middlebury.edu or 373-2556) or assistant producer Algy Layden
alayden27@gmail.com or 989-1901.
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