The Threepenny Opera Analysis

The Wrong Side of TownSoho, part of London's West End, has long been known as an "entertainment" district. In the nineteenth century this means prostitutes, music, and theatre—all big no-nos for...

Okay, so let's start with the easy one: drama. The Threepenny Opera is a drama because it's written for theatrical performance, and all of the story and relationships are expressed through dialogue...

The Threepenny Opera has had it with its own characters. It's doing everything it can to show its audiences just how awful and hypocritical they are, exposing their lies and deceit at every turn. F...

The Threepenny Opera's style is all over the place. Sometimes the characters are singing songs that don't seem to have anything to do with the plot, like the Pirate Jenny song that Penny performs a...

The Threepenny Opera is based on an earlier work, John Gay's 1728 The Beggar's Opera. The title refers to a small amount of money, three pennies or three coins. All of the characters are scrapping...

The Threepenny Opera ends with a sound: "The bells of Westminster are heard ringing for the third time" (3.9.375). Westminster Abbey's bells would have been ringing to celebrate Queen Victoria's c...

It's not easy, and you might run into an avalanche of "say what?" on your way, but when you finally get all the pieces into place, you'll be so proud that you made it to the top.

Lock Up Your DaughtersWe meet the main characters and learn that Polly Peachum has disappeared with a mysterious stranger known as Mac the Knife. This sets up the main conflict between her dad, Mr...

Characters have become "dark" because they are living in a corrupt, capitalist system. Everything is for sale, even human compassion, and therefore no one really has a soul anymore. There's not e...

Act I corresponds to, you guessed it, Act I, in which we meet the characters and Polly marries Mac. Peachum goes berserk over the secret wedding, setting up his actions in Act II. This is easy: Ac...

In a recent production of The Threepenny Opera, Queen Victoria was played by a bulldog. (Source.) When Bertolt Brecht died, he had 4,000 books. (Source.) Brecht and Weill wrote a lot of The Threep...

Nothing happens onstage, in view of the public, but there is plenty of talk about… um, it. Mac is always, well, macking on someone, whether it's Polly, Lucy, or his friends at the house of ill re...

Castor and Pollux (1.2.457)Hector and Andromache (1.2.457-458)Judas Iscariot (3.7.35)Nero (2.6.261)Rameses II (2.6.348)Semiramis (2.6.352-356)Solomon (3.7.257-267)Cleopatra (3.7.268-277)Caesar (3.7...