[1] Ellington and Latouche updated the play's locale to a modern American city and turned Macheath into what Bowers calls "a pin-stripe-suited mobster, a singing, dancing Bugsy Siegel."

No Broadway cast album was recorded, but a demo tape was discovered and released, together with the score from the West End musical Bet Your Life featuring Julie Wilson and Sally Ann Howes, on an LP on the Blue Pear label.

The musical is set in a corrupt world inhabited by rakish mobsters and their double crossing gangs, raffish madams and their dissolute whores, panhandlers and street people as they conduct their dirty business, ply their trade, and struggle to survive in brothels, shanty towns, and prisons.

[3] In 2004, Dale Wasserman, one of the musical's producers and the author of Man of La Mancha, teamed with the Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley, California to create a revamped, updated, and radically rewritten version[4] that toned down much of the original's social criticism and political humor.

In 2012, French baritone David Serero performed and produced a full revival production of Beggar's Holiday by Ellington and Wasserman in November 2012 in Paris with an international cast including Emmy Award winner John Altman, Charlie Glad, Gilles San Juan and directed by James Marvel.