A Fetish for Alienation

By JULIA M. KLEIN

The haunting strains of Kurt Weill's music for The Threepenny Opera are an indelible part of American popular culture — and, for those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 60s, so are Marc Blitzstein's brilliant, if PG-rated, lyrics, freely adapted from the German. The 1954 Blitzstein production, with Weill's widow, Lotte Lenya, reprising...