Those Who Live in the Dark

In the late summer of 1928, at the small Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, the thirty-year-old playwright Bertolt Brecht and the twenty-eight-year-old composer Kurt Weill premiered Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), an “anti-opera”—as Weill imagined it—about an underworld of beggars, criminals, and prostitutes. It caused a sensation. Performances sold out, Berlin clubs hosted Dreigroschen dance bands, and […]