The Roundabout Theatre Company has extended its limited engagement of The Threepenny Opera by a week. The show will now run at Studio 54 through June 25.
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's most popular collaboration, The Threepenny Opera is based on John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. The show centers on Macheath Alan Cumming, a vicious character. In the tuner, Macheath, or Mack the Knife as he is known, marries the impressionable and innocent Polly Peachum Nellie McKay, much to the displeasure of her father Jim Dale and mother Ana Gasteyer. Throughout his marriage, and a series of arrests, he maintains a strong relationship with his mistress, Pirate Jenny Cyndi Lauper.
The production, directed by Scott Elliott, opened to mostly negative reviews on April 20. In his Broadway.com Review of the mounting, Rob Kendt wrote: "Ouch! Broadway's new Threepenny Opera hurts—the eyes, the brain, and, at close to three hours, the ass. It's not so hard on the ears, as music director Kevin Stites makes Kurt Weill's prickly neo-classical score glitter and glare. But director Scott Elliott, using a showily crude and oddly spliced new translation by playwright Wallace Shawn, has turned Bertolt Brecht's 1928 play, about petit-bourgeois capitalists whose trades happen to be murder, fraud, and prostitution, into a dull hodgepodge of unfunny comedy sketches and he's dressed it in the semi-contemporary drag of Isaac Mizrahi's pointedly ugly costumes."
