In this brief review, Clurman finds in The Threepenny Opera an appeal that audiences can trace to historic events such as the Great Depression as well as more personal themes such as regret and loss.

Kurt Weill's and Bert Brecht's The Threepenny Opera is a masterpiece; in its present production at the Theatre de Ly s it very nearly misses fire. Such is the paradox of the theatre: the presentation is almost as much part of a play as the material itself.

The Threepenny Opera—called that because it is so oddly conceived that it might be a beggar's dream and so cheaply done that it might meet a beggar's budget—sums up a whole epoch and evokes a special state of mind. The epoch is not just the Berlin of 1919-1928; it is any epoch in which a lurid rascality combined with fierce contrasts...