The Beggar's Opera

About

Gay's 1728 ballad opera was the biggest theatrical hit of the eighteenth century, running for sixty-two consecutive performances — an unprecedented run for the era. Macheath the highwayman and Polly Peachum, daughter of a criminal fence, play out a plot that satirizes both Italian opera (then fashionable and expensive) and Robert Walpole's government, which Gay saw as a criminal organization with better manners. The music consists of popular tunes with new words by Gay; Brecht famously reworked it as The Threepenny Opera two centuries later. The Beggar's Opera effectively invented the English musical theater tradition.