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There are interesting links between Bernstein, Blitzstein, Candide, and Threepenny. As a Harvard senior in 1939, Bernstein organized a student production of Blitzstein’s Brechtian musical The Cradle Will Rock—which had gained notoriety two years earlier when the New Deal program that funded its development, the Federal Theatre Project, attempted to cancel its New York premiere in response to Republican attacks on arts funding. In 1952, Bernstein—by then an internationally known conductor—led a concert performance of the Weill-Brecht-Blitzstein Threepenny at Brandeis University. (Also featured: the premiere of Bernstein’s one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti, which Evanston’s Next Theatre revived last February.) The Brandeis performance paved the way for a full-blown off-Broadway production—the first professional New York staging of Threepenny since 1933, when it flopped on Broadway in a different translation. Blitzstein’s version opened in 1954 at the Theatre de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel Theatre) and ran for seven years. Of the several English versions of Threepenny floating around—including a recent effort by Wallace Shawn, for a poorly received 2006 Broadway revival—Blitzstein’s is probably the least faithful to Brecht’s original lyrics. But it’s the most idiomatically American, and the most singable—not surprising, since Blitzstein was primarily a composer.
Threepenny received its professional Chicago premiere in 1953 at the Playwrights Theatre Club, forerunner of the Compass Players and Second City. Directed by Paul Sills, with musical direction by Sheldon Patinkin, the production employed a translation by Brecht scholar Eric Bentley. The cast included Barbara Harris, Zohra Lampert, and Ed Asner, who portrayed Mr. Peachum—a role he would later play again off-Broadway. Playwrights’ staging was preceded here in 1948 by a student production at Northwestern University, featuring Paul Lynde, Claude Akins, and Charlotte Rae Lubotsky as Mrs. Peachum. A few years later, after dropping her last name and moving to New York, Rae reprised her role in the original cast of Blitzstein’s adaptation.
