dead dog in a suitcase
Photography Steve Tanner
“Outrageously good fun”
In 2014, Charles Hazlewood scored the radical reworking of the John Gay’s The Beggars Opera with the Kneehigh Theatre Company, called Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and other love songs). This co-production with the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse was written by Carl Grose and directed by Mike Shepherd. The show toured the UK and internationally in 2015/16 and again in 2019 and was listed in the 10 ten shows of 2015 by the Guardian newspaper.
“Forget your classic arias; this is an opera of rockstar proportions. We careen through the production to a soundtrack of ska, punk, pop and electro”
“It was Charles Hazlewood’s score that stole the honours. There are not many composers cool enough to convincingly connect traditional folk ballads with grime, ska and dubstep. But miraculously, Hazlewood pulled it off”
“A riot… Would I go and see this again? Like a shot.”
“Fiendishly clever…a constant barrage of visual, theatrical and musical surprises”
“Swapping 18th-century street ballads for ska and dubstep, Kneehigh’s reworking of The Beggar’s Opera is bright, bold and curiously timeless. John Gay invented the jukebox musical. Charles Hazlewood creates a superior form of jukebox. Hazlewood has the ability to create through-composed sequences of genuine thematic development, but also an ear wide enough to suggest that bawdy 18th-century airs and catches share a direct bloodline with ska, grime and dubstep.”
“The Brecht-Weill Ballad of Mack the Knife will now seem rather passe after being faced with the brazen cheek of Hazlewood’s extraordinary score.”