That's the musical offer at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where a rare production of Kurt Weill's brilliant and highly influential "The Threepenny Opera" shills for your attention this weekend.

Weill's world is a rough-and-tumble den of petty thieves, whores, beggars and ruffians in Jack-the-Ripper London. Students in the IPFW Opera Workshop production are losing themselves in it with abandon.

"How do I look?" Ryan Jones asks director Rebecca Hiatt McConnaughey at a costume check. Jones plays a poor, scruffy vixen. She's wearing a humdrum dress and an overcoat draped with a cardboard sign proclaiming her hunger.

"You look disgusting. That's great," McConnaughey replies. "Love the black eye-liner. But the coat is far too nice. See if you can find something ugly in the costume shop."

Other students are rehearsing sexy dance numbers choreographed by Gary Lanier, complete with tango dips.

"Do the dip again, please," a photographer shouts to dancersKimberly Faught and Christopher Rasor.

Students in the audience cackle and catcall. "Call me a whore with a dip," Faught quips. She plays Jenny Diver, a prostitute who had a relationship with MacHeath, her father's archrival for gang control, but betrays him. Rasor plays MacHeath.

"The Threepenny Opera" caused a riot when it premiered in Berlin in 1928. As McConnaughey explains, the opera was a thinly disguised assault on social injustice and bourgeois hypocrisy in European society, and a reaction to Wagnerian grand opera and musical snobbery.

Innovative German stage and film writers and directors, painters, architects and composers were the envy of the Western world.

But at the same time, Hitler's Nazis were growing in political strength and numbers. They swore to restore German honor

and economic growth in the bitter aftermath of Deutschland's defeat in World War I, and to get rid of Jews, Communists and anyone else who opposed their plans.

The Nazis attacked "The Threepenny Opera" as the work of Jews and other enemies of the state, and staged a riot at the Berlin premiere. Audience members dared to disagree, applauding the cast with 30 curtain calls. The show became a huge success in Germany and around the world, and had a dramatic impact on American musical theater to come.

"Without Kurt Weill there wouldn't have been a Leonard Bernstein or a Stephen Sondheim," McConnaughey says.

Weill was continuing a theater tradition of attacking a repressive establishment, McConnaughey says. The composer's main inspiration was "The Beggar's Opera," a satirical work from 1728 by John Gay ridiculing the political and operatic trends of his day.

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James Ator, saxophonist, composer and director of jazz studies at IPFW, cites an even earlier literary model for "The Threepenny Opera" -- Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" from the Middle Ages.

"It's the same story all over again," he says. "The plague is coming, so everybody is saying let's all get drunk and have sex till we're blind. What's right? Wrong? Nobody knows anymore."

Weill called his show "The Threepenny Opera" because, as the Ballad Singer explains at the start, "This opera is so magnificent, only a beggar could have thought it up, and because it still had to be so cheap even beggars could afford it, we call it 'The Threepenny Opera.' "

Fort Wayne audiences have been beggared by the absence of "The Threepenny Opera" productions. The last one anyone can remember was at IPFW about 20 years ago, Lanier says.

McConnaughey says she wanted to do it this year to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Weill's birth. Weill fled Germany in 1933, settled in America, and died in 1950.

McConnaughey and Ator are especially pleased that the production showcases and stretches the talents of IPFW music and theater students. Except for pianist Donna Hartleroad and accordionist Ann Donner, all the performers are students.

Jazz students get a chance to play in what Ator describes as a "pre-jazz German cabaret band with unusual instrumentation" (lots of horns mixed with banjo, guitar and accordion). And they hear how the show's biggest hit, "Mack the Knife," originally sounded. It's more of a bleary, boozy ballad than the razzle-dazzle, finger-snapping version Bobby Darin took to the top of the Billboard chart in 1959.

For senior IPFW theater major Rasor, it was a great way to end his college career. "I've done five operas here and a lot of shows at PIT (Purdue-Indiana Theatre) and the (Fort Wayne) Civic Theatre, but this is the most demanding role I've ever played. I have to consider so many things at once -- the song, the acting, who I'm looking at on stage and in the audience."

Rasor also has to remember not to downplay the depths of his character's corruption: "I'm having a hard time not playing MacHeath too nice."

Nice is definitely not a word to describe any character in "Threepenny Opera." Audiences are warned that the rough language and adult situations are meant for mature audiences.

"If people from Leo who don't get out much come to the show, they might be offended at first," Ator says. "But once they get over the naughtiness, they'll be excited and laughing like the rest of us. Despite the bleakness, 'Threepenny Opera' is a lot of fun."

Polly Peachum (Jennifer Poiry), left, sings with Lucy Brown (Natalie Inskeep) in the IPFW Department of Music's production of The Threepenny Opera.

Photo by Brian Tombaugh
Staff Photographer
Photographed March 29, 2000
Fort Wayne, IN USA

ON STAGE

A 'Threepenny Opera' worth a buck or four

It caused a riot at its 1928 opening, and promises just as much dazzle and excitement on the IPFW stage.

Seedy satire