According to Sondheim, he was asked to translate "Mahagonny-Songspiel": "But, I'm not a Brecht/Weill fan and that's really all there is to it. I'm an apostate: I like Weill's music when he came to America better than I do his stuff before ... I love "The Threepenny Opera" but, outside of "The Threepenny Opera", the music of his I like is the stuff he wrote in America – when he was not writing with Brecht, when he was writing for Broadway." He turned down an offer to musicalize Nathanael West's "A Cool Million" with James Lapine around 1982.