Happy End (musical)

Happy End
1977 Broadway Playbill
Music	Kurt Weill
Lyrics	Bertolt Brecht
Book	Elisabeth Hauptmann
Productions	1929 Berlin 1956 Munich 1957 Hamburg 1965 West End 1977 Broadway 2006 San Francisco 2014 Stockholm 2016 Buenos Aires

Happy End is a three-act musical comedy by Kurt Weill, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and Bertolt Brecht which first opened in Berlin at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm on September 2, 1929. It closed after seven performances. In 1977 it premiered on Broadway, where it ran for 75 performances.

After the success of Weill and Brecht's previous collaboration, The Threepenny Opera, the duo devised this musical, written by Elisabeth Hauptmann under the pseudonym of Dorothy Lane. Hauptmann's sources included, among others, Major Barbara.

The story is reminiscent of, but not the source of, the better-known musical Guys and Dolls, which is based on Damon Runyon's short story, "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown".

The debut was plagued by problems. Hauptmann never finished the book of the musical, the play's opening debut saw cast member Helene Weigel reading from a Communist pamphlet on stage, and it was met with near-unanimous pans from the German press and deemed a total failure. Nevertheless, the musical was subsequently produced in Europe, the first time in Munich in 1956. Successive productions included Hamburg in 1957, London in 1965 at the Royal Court Theatre, Oxford and the West End's Lyric Theatre in 1975 and Frankfurt in 1983, along with a 1979 German film version.

The musical premiered on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre on May 7, 1977, and closed on July 10, 1977, after 75 performances. Directed by Robert Kalfin and Patricia Birch and staged by Birch, the cast starred Christopher Lloyd, Grayson Hall and Meryl Streep.