As usual, The Straight Dope gets it partly right.
Brecht and Weill were socialists/communists.
They don't make it clear that
Dre Dreigroschenoper is still set in England - though in the time of Victoria's ascension to the throne. hey don't mention that Macheath - bad as he is - is not the villain of the piece ... that Peachum, the "respectable businessman" who runs a protection racket among London's beggars.
(In fact,
The Threepenny Novel, written later by Brecht, expanding on the story of the opera, makes it fairly clear that Macheath may not, in fact, be "The Knife", simply a sleazy opportunist taking credit for the crimes of an unknown other to build street cred.)
And, especially, they repeat the misinformation that Blitzstein "cleaned up" the songs - the bowdlerisations were done for the cast album, at the behest of the label head - one song dropped entirely, language bowdlerised and another song almost entirely rewritten from Blitzstein's original adaptation, which made it clear that Macheath and Jenny (Lotte Lenya in the off-Broadway production) are singing nostalgically about when Macheath was her pimp.
(That album also featured Beatrice Arthur, Paul Dooley and John Astin)
Since at least the Sixties, most people only know the Blitzstein, and only from from that bowdlerised album.
Weill left Germany because he was a Jew; Brecht fled because he was on the list as a Kultur-Bolshevik, a commie intellectual.
After the war began, Brecht and Weill collaborated on
at least one more song...
And if you want to hear a REALLY down'n'dirty "moritat" ("Murder Ballad" - the actual title of "Mack the Knife" - a popular form of broadside ballad*, performed by street singers, retelling famous crimes and the deeds of famous criminals, as it is to open "Threepenny") -
try this one.
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* Another popular broadside ballad form was "goodnights" - songs supposedly based on famous criminals' last words as they were about to be hanged. As in "
Threepenny".
The girl in the background with the red hat is Beatrice Arthur, 1953, who certainly was, as she sang in the "
Jealousy Duet", "...a big,
complete girl...". I can visualise the shoulders proudly thrown back on that line. (As actually originally written/arranged, that line was supposed to go to the soprano, Polly Peachum, Macheath's second wife, but the woman playing Polly was a small girl, and Bea Arthur, playing Lucy Brown, his undivorced FIRST wife ... well ... she was Bea Arthur.)
"
'not available' whether that means 'wrong country', content, copyright issues, or just 'not been watched enough'???