Today the cantata and the opera are considered separately, the latter holding a place in the repertory, the former being an occasional piece staged in small theaters or programmed as an outgrowth of a song recital when resources permit.

Brecht directed, Lotte Lenya played Jessie, and the set-design was by Caspar Neher, who placed the scene in a boxing-ring before background projections that interjected scene-titles at the start of each section.

[3] According to a sketch published years later, they read: A programme note for the performance stated: Mahagonny is a short epic play which simply draws conclusions from the irresistible decline of our existing social classes.

[6] On 20 January 1971 the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven presented the work directed by Michael Posnick and conducted by Thomas Fay in a double-bill with Brecht & Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins.

Twenty-first century productions took place on 25 March 2000 in New York by the Ensemble Weill directed by Ari Benjamin Meyers and on 5 and 7 June 2008, the Seattle Symphony under Gerard Schwarz performed the piece.