Random Acts

National Theatre Live presents The Threepenny Opera; Santa Fe Symphony gets rolling; Teatro Paraguas stages Revolution; Music for Severall Friends go to the Santa Fe Woman’s Club; Los Angeles Guitar Quartet plays Los Alamos High School; and cellist Dmitry Kouzov gives a free recital

The Threepenny Opera, a “play with music” by dramatist Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, is one of the most enduring artistic statements of the Weimar Republic. Unveiled in Berlin in 1928, it reinterpreted the popular 18th-century ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera in the context of modern times, offering a biting socialist critique on the decadence of a world hanging itself with the rope of capitalism. The Threepenny Opera quickly became an international hit. By 1933, when Brecht and Weill fled Germany with the Nazis barking at their heels, it had been performed more than 10,000 times in 18 languages, and some of its songs — “The Ballad of Mack the Knife,” “Pirate Jenny,” and “Cannon Song” — were becoming repertoire standards. This raucous, sinister masterwork, in a new adaptation by playwright Simon Stephens, is running at the Olivier Theatre in London, with Rory Kinnear in the leading role of Macheath. The production will be broadcast at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 29, as part of the National Theatre Live in HD series at the Lensic Performing Arts Center (211 W. San Francisco St.). Tickets ($22) can be had through www.ticketssantafe.org (505-988-1234). — James M. Keller