state of the union; A rousing musical burlesque and a sober neo-Shakespearean drama offer unsettling looks at our time, writes Adam Green.(The Threepenny Opera)(Stuff Happens)(Theater review)(Opera review)

scathing indictment of bourgeois morals set in Victorian London by way of Weimar Berlin, The Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's landmark 1928 collaboration, is a musical-_theater masterpiece. It was last seen on Broadway in 1989 in a toothless revival starring Sting. Now the sardonic tale of Mack the Knife is back in town, newly translated by Wallace Shawn, with all the original's lacerating bite. "It's wildly entertaining, of course, but it also expresses a shocking level of class rage-most people simply can't imagine that they're actually hearing what they're hearing," Shawn says. "It's wonderful to do it today, when the rich are running riot and devouring everything in a way that they could only have dreamed of in the twenties."

Shawn has given us a splendidly Rabelaisian, acid-etched rendition of Brecht's libretto-itself a quasi-Marxist take on John Gay's 1728 Beggar's Opera-whose cheerful thesis is "The world is poor, men aren't good." Shawn says, "I wouldn't be capable of translating Brecht if I didn't have a nasty side to my personality."

Helming the production is Scott Elliott, who, two seasons ago, directed a haunting revival of Shawn's 1985 political black comedy Aunt Dan and Lemon. In Aunt Dan, as in his recent staging of Abigail's Party, Elliott struck a balance that showed the characters in both their broad social roles and their messy human particulars. He hopes to do the same here. "You can be academic with Threepenny and really turn people off, or you can be a little more seductive," he says. "At the end, I want the audience to _realize, Oh, my God-I fell in love with a murderer. Now, that's Brechtian alienation."

The murderer in question-not to mention thief, pimp, rapist, and capitalist par excellence-is played by Alan Cumming, revisiting the maelstrom of prewar Germany that he embodied with such insinuating menace in Sam Mendes's 1998 revival of Cabaret. "One minute he's violent, and the next he's witty and tender," Cumming says of the hero-_villain Mac_heath, whose marriage to an ingenue sets off a chain of betrayal among London's beggars, thieves, prostitutes, and police.

The refreshingly offbeat cast (outfitted by Isaac Mizrahi) also includes, along with a chorus of drag queens, the Broadway veteran Jim Dale and the former SNL star Ana Gasteyer as a power couple of London's lower depths, and the singer Cyndi Lauper as the world-weary whore Jenny Diver. "There's a sort of pop element to the show, a mixing of the old and the new, and this bunch really embodies that," Cumming says.

No one embodies it more than the 21-year-old singer-songwriter Nellie McKay, an inspired choice to play the almost virginal Polly Peachum. An eccentric beauty, a gifted tunesmith, and a wry, passionate performer, McKay exudes a Doris Day-meets-Janis ...