Happy
End was Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brechts’s gangster musical
follow-up to The Threepenny Opera. Surprisingly little known today
- through its initial hostile reception in the political turmoil
of Berlin in 1929 - its songs remain beautiful & timeless
classics: Surabaya Johnny, The Mandalay Song and Bilbao Song,
to name but three.
A
Chicago gang plot to rob a bank, when the intervention of a Salvation
Army evangelist who falls for the gang’s leader causes some
confusion… but then an eventual ‘happy end’.
Ostensibly melodramatic and entertainment-driven, this Comedy
Musical nevertheless packs an ultimately political punch, in its
magnificent closing song Hosanna Rockefeller: a bitter and ironic
‘tribute’ to the rich and powerful people of this
world.
Trucco
exploit the full potential of this Brecht / Weill early work,
to present a fantastic evening’s entertainment at the famous
Minack open air theatre, on the cliffs at Porthcurno – Cornwall’s
‘theatre under the stars’.
