Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

Format: DVD Runtime: 150 minutes Series: Great Performances Closed captioned: No Home Video Only

Welcome to Mahagonny, where sin is in and love is always on sale. This Old West boomtown rises from the desert to become a razzle-dazzle mecca for lust, liberty, and the pursuit of pleasure. Cash is king, poverty is punishable by death, and anything worth doing is worth overdoing. With book and lyrics by the influential playwright Bertolt Brecht, four-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald stars as Jenny, a tart-with-a-heart, and Broadway legend Patti LuPone as the town's feisty madam. Kurt Weill (composer of “Mack the Knife” and "The Threepenny Opera") penned a haunting score, which crosses over from opera to cabaret to Broadway including ragtime, jazz, raucous music hall songs and the classic pop hit “Moon of Alabama”. John Doyle, the director of Broadway's smash hit revival of "Sweeney Todd", delivers a risqué new production as controversial as the original one banned by the Nazis in the 1930s.