Beggar's Holiday

The project originated with black scenic designer Perry Watkins, who envisioned a jazz-driven adaptation of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. Watkins hired John Latouche, who'd written lyrics for the cantata "Ballad for Americans" and "Cabin in the Sky," and teamed him with Ellington, still best known at the time as a band leader.^[1]

Ellington and Latouche updated the play's locale to a modern American city and turned Macheath into what Bowers calls "a pin-stripe-suited mobster, a singing, dancing Bugsy Siegel." The book itself mixed jazz and blues rhythms with more traditional musical theater, including comedy numbers written for Zero Mostel, making his Broadway debut as Peachum.^[1]

The Broadway production, directed by Nicholas Ray and choreographed by Valerie Bettis, opened on December 26, 1946 at The Broadway Theatre, where it ran for 111 performances. The cast included Alfred Drake, Zero Mostel, Bernice Parks, Jet MacDonald, Dorothy Johnson, Mildred Joanne Smith, Marie Bryant, Avon Long, William Dillard, Rollin Smith, Thomas Gomez, and Herbert Ross. The show included an interracial relationship resulting in nightly picketing outside the theater.

No Broadway cast album was recorded, but a demo tape was discovered and released, together with the score from the West End musical Bet Your Life featuring Julie Wilson and Sally Ann Howes, on an LP on the Blue Pear label.^[2] Lena Horne's recording of "Tomorrow Mountain," the show's first-act closer, was a hit.

The musical is set in a corrupt world inhabited by rakish mobsters and their double crossing gangs, raffish madams and their dissolute whores, panhandlers and street people as they conduct their dirty business, ply their trade, and struggle to survive in brothels, shanty towns, and prisons. The plot focuses on the exploits of MacHeath, a suave New York mobster, his three women, and their various trials and tribulations with the law.

• MacHeath, a ruthless mobster
• Jenny, MacHeath's lover
• Polly Peachum, MacHeath's wife
• Hamilton Peachum, Polly's father
• Mrs. Peachum, Polly's mother
• Lucy Lockit, daughter of the Chief of Police
• Careless Love
• The Cocoa Girl
• Chief of Police Lockit
• The Horn

Notes

• §: Lyrics based on poem by William Butler Yeats