The Beggar's Opera and Polly

Author: John Gay
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191645753
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
'Gamesters and Highwaymen are generally very good to their Whores, but they are very Devils to their Wives.' With The Beggar's Opera (1728), John Gay created one of the most enduringly popular works in English theatre history, and invented a new dramatic form, the ballad opera. Gay's daring mixture of caustic political satire, well-loved popular tunes, and a story of crime and betrayal set in the urban underworld of prostitutes and thieves was an overnight sensation. Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum have become famous well beyond the confines of Gay's original play, and in its sequel, Polly, banned in Gay's lifetime, their adventures continue in the West Indies. With a cross-dressing heroine and a cast of female adventurers, pirates, Indian princes, rebel slaves, and rapacious landowners, Polly lays bare a culture in which all human relationships are reduced to commercial transactions. Raucous, lyrical, witty, ironic and tragic by turns, The Beggar's Opera and Polly - published together here for the first time - offer a scathing and ebullient portrait of a society in which statesmen and outlaws, colonialists and pirates, are impossible to tell apart. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Beggar's Opera

Author: Peggy Janice Blair
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780143186427
Category : Canadians
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
IN BEAUTIFUL, CRUMBLING OLD Havana, detective Mike Ellis hopes the sun and sand will save his troubled marriage. He doesn't yet know that it's dead in the water, much like the little Cuban boy last seen begging the couple for a few pesos on the world famous Malecón. For Inspector Ricardo Ramirez, head of the Havana Major Crimes Unit, arresting Ellis isn't the problem--the law is. He has only seventy-two hours to secure an indictment and prevent a vicious killer from leaving the island. And Ramirez has his own troubles. He's dying of the same dementia that killed his grandmother, an incurable disease that makes him see the ghosts of victims of his unsolved cases. As he races against time, the dead haunt his every step. . . . First in a new series featuring Inspector Ramirez, The Beggar's Opera exposes the bureaucracy, corruption, and beauty of Hemingway's Havana.

John Gay's The Beggar's Opera

Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Chelsea House
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description

The Beggar's Opera

Author:
Publisher: Baker's Plays
ISBN: 9780874400717
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Book Description

From Garrick to Gluck

Author: Daniel Heartz
Publisher: Pendragon Press
ISBN: 9781576470817
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
A collection of 18 essays on musical theatre in the eighteenth century, written between 1967 and 2001

John Gay and the London Theatre

Author: Calhoun Winton
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813159369
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
The Beggar's Opera, often referred to today as the first musical comedy, was the most popular dramatic piece of the eighteenth century—and is the work that John Gay (1685-1732) is best remembered for having written. That association of popular music and satiric lyrics has proved to be continuingly attractive, and variations on the Opera have flourished in this century: by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, by Duke Ellington, and most recently by Vaclav Havel. The original opera itself is played all over the world in amateur and professional productions. But John Gay's place in all this has not been well defined. His Opera is often regarded as some sort of chance event. In John Gay and the London Theatre, the first book-length study of John Gay as dramatic author, Calhoun Winton recognized the Opera as part of an entirely self-conscious career in the theatre, a career that Gay pursued from his earliest days as a writer in London and continued to follow to his death. Winton emphasizes Gay's knowledge of and affection for music, acquired, he argues, by way of his association with Handel. Although concentrating on Gay and his theatrical career, Winton also limns a vivid portrait of London itself and of the London stage of Gay's time, a period of considerable turbulence both within and outside the theatre. Gay's plays reflect in varying ways and degrees that social, political, and cultural turmoil. Winton's study sheds new light not only on Gay and the theatre, but also on the politics and culture of his era.

The Beggar's Opera

Author: Václav Havel
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801438332
Category : Czech drama
Languages : en
Pages : 134

Book Description
The Czech President Vaclav Havel, a force on behalf of international human rights and his country's most celebrated dissident, first gained prominence as a playwright. During the period when Havel was blacklisted by the Czechoslovakian government for his political activism, productions of his work in and around Prague were regarded as subversive acts. The Beggar's Opera is a free-wheeling, highly politicized adaptation of John Gay's well-known eighteenth-century work of the same name. The play, reminiscent of Havel's earlier Garden Party and The Memorandum, is up to his best satirical standard. Like the Brecht/Weill Threepenny Opera, Havel's play uses an underworld milieu to explore the intermingled themes of love, loyalty, and treachery.Paul Wilson's new English translation of The Beggar's Opera is lively, idiomatic, and sensitive to underlying linguistic and political issues. The Cornell edition contains an Introduction by Peter Steiner that details the November 1, 1976, premiere of the play in the Prague suburb of Horní Pocernice, the reaction of the Czech secret police, and the measures the government took to punish and discredit those involved in the production. Eleven photographs--of the playwright, the actors, the theatre, and the actual performance--enhance the texture of the book.

The Jolly Beggars

Author: Robert Burns
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Scottish poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Book Description

Polly

Author: John Gay
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ballad operas
Languages : en
Pages : 96

Book Description

Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and Other Love Songs)

Author: Carl Grose
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1783196556
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 102

Book Description
Kneehigh Theatre Company presents Dead Dog in a Suitcase written by Carl Grose. What the HELL is the world coming to? Based on The Beggar's Opera, John Gay's classic musical satire, Dead Dog in a suitcase (and other love songs) is busting with wit, wonder and weirdness. An extraordinary Kneehigh cast of actor-musicians shoot, hoot and shimmy their way through this twisted morality tale of our times...by turns SHOCKING, HILARIOUS, HEARTFELT and ABSURD! Mayor Goodman has been assassinated. Contract killer Macheath has just married Pretty Polly Peachum and they plan to escape to a better world – but they aren't going anywhere. Not if pickled pilchard, hair gel and concrete tycoon Les Peachum and his wife have anything to do with it. See, they aren't happy with their daughter marrying Macheath. Not one bit. Before the day is out Macheath will face the hangman's noose and much more besides. All the while, the dogs are howling, the pier is creaking, the babes are crying, the concrete is cracking and the truth won't stay hidden for much longer... This is now, this is it The world is poor and man's a shit The game is rigged, nothing's truer Death's a joke and life a sewer!