Die Dreigroschenoper

In the organizer's words:

after John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera"

Playing time: 2 hours 40 minutes, intermission after 1 hour 30 minutes

It is a celebration of unscrupulousness, nightlife and wicked love - an opera of cold-blooded and merciless criminals who would also like a glamorous life or at least a bigger slice of the pie of happiness than the man next to them. And who can blame them? After all, who wouldn't want to be - a happy and good person?

The two gangsters Peachum and Mackie Messer use unfair means to compete for supremacy in London's underground: while Peachum runs an agency for particularly pitiful beggars, Mackie knows extremely well how to make a living stealing and murdering at the expense of others. When Mackie and Peachum's daughter Polly secretly marry, the newlyweds promise to turn Soho upside down - and create a scandal in the criminal milieu. The gaps in the constitutional system are as great as the corruptibility of its individuals, whose harsh selfishness and sheer will to survive are passionately and honestly celebrated in Brecht's iconic play from the Weimar Republic. Kurt Weill's no less iconic music invites us to revel in them and their sins and also to empathize with them: "Yes, you just have to lie down / Yes, you can't be cold and heartless!"