A staged concert with selections from John Gay and Johann Christian Pepusch's The Beggar's Opera, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera and John Latouche and Duke Ellington's Beggar's Holiday. Steve Newman of the College of Liberal Arts and Marcus DeLoach of the Department of Vocal Arts present a multidisciplinary performance based on material of John Gay's seminal work The Beggar's Opera (1728) and two subsequent pieces which were inspired by it. Led by stage director Kyle Metzger of Theater, Film, and Media Arts (TFMA) and music director Steven Gross (TFMA), students explore the three treatments in an innovative side by side comparison all accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble in the intimate setting of the Chapel of the Four Chaplains in The Temple Performing Arts Center (TPAC).

The Beggar’s Trio takes the audience on a rich musical journey from Baroque adaptations of eighteenth-century street ballads to Weill’s inimitable mix of high and vernacular idioms to Ellington’s jazz mastery, the love triangle and political satire at the heart of our textual trio colored by their historical situations--Georgian London, Weimar Berlin, and 1940s New York.

The performance is an outgrowth of Newman's scholarship on The Beggar's Opera and his innovative web resource www.beggarsopera.net where scholars and others can learn more about Gay's rich literary source which continues to inspire artists almost three hundred years after its premiere. This project has been made possible by grants from the Offices of the Vice President for Research, the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, and the Opera Development Fund.