A look back at
the making of
‘The Beggar’s Trio,’
a cross-disciplinary opera

On Jan. 26, 2025, faculty and students from Temple’s College of Liberal Arts; Boyer College of Music and Dance; and School of Theater, Film and Media Arts joined together for two performances of The Beggar’s Trio at the Temple Performing Arts Center’s Chapel of Four Chaplains.

“The whole thing's been a big experiment,” said Marcus DeLoach, co-producer and associate professor of voice and opera at Boyer. “It’s our job in academia to be asking questions and doing experiments, so with this we were like, ‘Let’s take this historic performance material, study it deeply and see how it works in these different iterations.”

The Beggar’s Trio is an amalgam of three plays: John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and two of its adaptations, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (1928) and John Latouche and Duke Ellington’s Beggar’s Holiday (1946). Temple’s performance is the first time the three plays have been blended together into one.

“All the different components came together and ended up being something of a new piece. And it seemed like people walked away with an understanding of how the same story and its ideas could succeed in three different treatments,” added DeLoach.

The three plays tell different versions of the same story in which a man named Macheath gets involved in a love triangle and grapples with a grim fate. It’s a classic tale of love, justice and class mobility that has resonated with audiences throughout time.

“The Beggar’s Opera is timeless because the characters are both compelling and familiar. The theme of standing up to power and the divide between the haves and the have-nots is pretty universal,” said DeLoach.

Since The Beggar’s Trio incorporated plays from different musical styles and traditions, it gave student performers a unique opportunity to expand their skill sets.

“It was great training for the opera and vocal performance students who don’t do scene work often, whereas musical theater students work with dialogue all the time but rarely do opera,” said Steven Gross, music director/arranger and associate professor of theater at the School of Theater, Film and Media Arts. “The performance challenged everybody in styles of music and acting that they probably don’t go into often.”

Nalani Matthias, a second-year master’s student in vocal arts at Boyer, played the role of Lucy Lockett in the Beggar’s Holiday portion of the show. As a performer, she valued the opportunity to delve into new styles. “I’ve never done anything that bridged opera, classical and jazz like The Beggar’s Trio did. It was such a unique project and it was great to work with new people,” said Matthias.

The production was the result of a long process of planning and cross-disciplinary collaboration going back to 2016. Co-producer and Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the College of Liberal Arts Steve Newman, whose scholarship focuses on The Beggar’s Opera, had the idea to make a scholarly edition of the text of the play along with a performance element. He collaborated with DeLoach to stage excerpts for a performance at Paley Library on Main Campus and eventually Bruton Parish Episcopal Church in Williamsburg, Virginia. Following those performances, they knew they wanted to do something involving The Beggar’s Trio’s multiple adaptations.

“We were just waiting for the right moment. Obviously Covid complicated things, and then it was a matter of getting the funding. Eventually all the stars aligned,” said Newman.

Funding for the performance came from the Vice Provost of the Arts Grant, which supports interdisciplinary projects involving students and faculty, as well as the Boyer Opera Development Fund, the provost, the vice provost for faculty, and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research.

Now that The Beggar's Trio has been performed on campus, Newman is creating a website about The Beggar's Opera and its adaptations, intended for scholars, musicians and students. The stage director, Kyle Metzger, adjunct professor in theater, film and media arts, is also involved in discussions for a follow-up performance at another venue in Philadelphia this spring.

"My hope is that we can use this performance as a resource for anybody who's interested in The Beggar's Opera, but also musical theater in general. We're trying to bring the text to life," said Newman.