#the thrupenny opera

[unwelcome-ephestion]

What was the first musical...?

...is sort of a redundant question. Theatre has been musical for as long as there has been theatre. The earliest musical that we would recognise as fitting the modern genre? Some say Show Boat; some go further back to the Black Crook - but the earliest play normally posited is John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1727).

Don't let the title fool you - it's not an opera so much as it is a parody of opera. It's closer to a jukebox musical - all the songs are well known tunes parodied. Some opera, mainly Handel within that, but also a lot of popular song - near the end you get Greensleeves. But this isn't jukebox in the modern sense - the lyrics are changed to apply to the play, and often to take aim at government figures, in this case the corruption of the government of Prime Minister Walpole.

Ballad opera, as the style came to be known, was phenomenally popular and also controversial. Polly, the sequel to the Beggar's Opera, was censored and so never staged, though scripts were pirated and sold. The same is true of many other ballad operas, more highly censored than other stage works because their popularity with the masses was so dangerous. By the end of the 1730s, censorship had all but killed the genre - but not without a prolific decade of government criticism. The use of popular songs was particularly useful, because the use of well known songs could reference certain scandals or politics without ever actually lyrically mentioning them, making them very tricky to clamp down on.

(I specialised in this in university so if anyone wants to read more about this absolutely let me know.)

The Beggar's Opera is now best known in the form of the Threepenny Opera, into which it was adapted by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill - with new music. The most famous song from which is none other than Mack the Knife! So the show still, in its way, resonates in popular culture today.

[matt-brooker]

Beautiful interior design on #hachette's #2000adultimatecollection issue 135 (vol 129) of #stickleback collecting the last 3 stories - Number of the Beast, Thrupenny Opera and New Jerusalem. @ianedginton #2000ad @2000adcomic #hachette #rebellion https://www.instagram.com/p/CmPe5QksZ7G/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=