This spring, an interdisciplinary course and production will focus on The Threepenny Opera, the trail-blazing musical collaboration of dramatist Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, which updated John Gay's Beggar's Opera for a restive German audience during the decadent years of the Weimar Republic. The show transformed the musical theatre, drawing inspiration from jazz and cabaret and levying a fierce social and political critique. This site-specific workshop production, in a non-traditional theatrical space, will apply elements of Brecht's philosophies of alienation and epic theatre and serve as a creative laboratory. Students will be challenged to take an active role in the work's re-presentation.