Next week, PBS offers a very different way to celebrate the holiday season when it airs the Los Angeles Opera's 2007 production of the 1930 Brecht/Weill opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Starting Monday, December 17, Great Performances will broadcast the opera, starring Audra McDonald and Patti LuPone. John Doyle, who directed LuPone in the recent Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd, helmed this production of the work, which PBS calls a "savage and lyrical satire told in a highly entertaining blend of opera and raucous music hall songs."
Next week, PBS offers a very different way to celebrate the holiday season when it airs the Los Angeles Opera's 2007 production of the 1930 Brecht/Weill opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Starting Monday, December 17, Great Performances will broadcast the opera, starring Tony winners Audra McDonald as an ambitious whore and Patti LuPone as an enterprising madame. John Doyle, who directed LuPone in the recent Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd, helmed this production of the work, which PBS calls a "savage and lyrical satire told in a highly entertaining blend of opera and raucous music hall songs." As the Great Performances website tells it:
It's every man for himself in the newly founded city of Mahagonny, devoted to life's illicit pleasures, where anything goes and the only crime is to run out of money. The brilliant score, featuring the Brecht/Weill classic "Moon of Alabama," masterfully creates a vivid picture of determination, desperation, and debauchery.
For more information and local listings, visit thirteen.org.
