Word: beggars
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...Beggar's Holiday (book & lyrics by John Latouche; music by Duke Ellington; produced by Perry Watkins & John R. Sheppard Jr.) is "based on" John Gay's renowned and raffish 18th Century Beggar's Opera. The debt to Gay is not large. Beggar's Holiday has a present-day setting, a new book, new lyrics and new music. What it has kept is the general movement of the story, the principal low-life characters (one or two in name only) and the cheeky last-minute happy ending...
What it has parted with least wisely, for it has found nothing at all compensating, is most of the hardboiled, high-flying satire of The Beggar's Opera. Gay ripped open the underworld of his time to reveal its dissoluteness and dog-eat-dog love of lucre; but he had a corrupt great world equally in mind, even satirizing Prime Minister Robert Walpole. And Gay made his bawds and fences, his cutpurses and stool pigeons part of a pungent, roaring scene...
...Beggar's Holiday has a full crew of mobsters, doublecrossers and madams; it skips from brothels to hobo jungles to clinks; but it lacks satiric or any other kind of momentum. It skitters between monkeyshines and melodrama, dilutes the satire, overdoes the sex. But it remains, by Broadway standards, refreshingly unconventional. While giving little to Beggar's Holiday, The Beggar's Opera perhaps took something vital away-the chance to start from scratch, to build homogeneously from the ground...
Even in pure musicomedy terms, Beggar's Holiday has as many ups & downs as an elevator. But when it forgets that John Gay ever lived, and the mixed white and Negro cast sings and stomps to Duke Ellington's rhythmic tunes, Beggar's Holiday has real high spirits and character...
Supposedly 'a parallel in tempo to John Gay's 'Beggar's Opera'" (it will be entitled "Beggar's Holiday" during the New York run), the play deals with the insouciant exploits of one Macheath, a lady-killing crook. During the course of the show, Mae holes up at Miss Jenny's maison de joie, marries Polly Peachum--the daughter of a humorously crooked politician, and beguiles the keys to his cell door from the jailer's daughter--all in order to avoid the inevitable ending which awaits him in the arms of the electric chair...