Lyric Opera stages local premiere of Britten's 'Beggar's Opera'


Local opera fans will get a rare treat this weekend when Lyric Opera San Diego stages the San Diego premiere of Benjamin Britten's little-seen "The Beggar's Opera."

The 1948 opera, based on John Gay's 18th-century ballad opera of the same name, has been seen quite often in Great Britain but has been staged only rarely in the United States. The San Diego production will feature conductor James Lowe, associate music director of Houston Grand Opera, and a singing cast that includes Chad Frisque, Megan Weston, Douglin Schmidt, Dianna Sandler and Ava Liss. Lyric Opera San Diego general director Leon Natker stage directs the production, which opens Sept. 10 and runs through Sept. 19 at the Casa del Prado Theatre in Balboa Park.

While "The Beggar's Opera" has been around in one form or another for more than 275 years, local audiences are unlikely to be familiar with Britten's version of the story.

Originally written in 1728, Gay's bawdy English operetta was a shocking satire of the times. Beggars, prostitutes and criminals filled the stage and commented humorously on England's political corruption, the greed of the nobility and the rampant sex trade in London at the time. The lead character is MacHeath, a dashing highwayman, who is torn between the love for his wife and his mistress, so decides to keep them both.

Not surprisingly, "The Beggar's Opera" was a smash. Two hundred years later, German playwright Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill borrowed Gay's story and characters and staged "The Threepenny Opera," this time using the story as a commentary on the poverty, corruption and political problems in then-1928 Weimar Germany. The lead character of MacHeath was transformed into "Mack the Knife" (a character whom pop singer Bobby Darin later immortalized in song). And in 1953, Hollywood made Gay's play into a colorful, eye-opening musical film starring Laurence Olivier.

The Britten version of "Beggar's Opera" premiered in 1948 at the Aldeborough Festival in Cambridge, England, and enjoyed great success in England through the 1950s. Britten revamped the setting of the drama and reworked the more than 60 songs that were in Gay's original musical. Instead of taking place in the streets of London, Britten's version takes place in a laundry populated by beggars, who re-enact the story of MacHeath and his two lovers using minimal sets and props inside the laundry. Retained from the original Gay tale is the unusual audience-participatory stage device, where patrons can help save MacHeath from the gallows with their applause.

"The Beggar's Opera" will be one of Lyric Opera's last productions in the Casa del Prado Theatre (Gilbert and Sullivan's "Princess Ida" closes the season Nov. 12-21). At the conclusion of the company's 2004-05 season, Lyric Opera will move to its new permanent home, the North Park Theatre, which is now in the midst of a multimillion-dollar renovation.


