Adapted by David Newham from John Gay’s original opera. Directed by David Newham. Music by Daniel Deorksen. A Seven Tyrants Theatre production. At the Jericho Arts Centre on Thursday, March 6. Continues until March 14

This amateur production blows most professional shows I’ve seen lately out of the water. It’s got vision—and follow-through.

Thanks to the inspired work of director-adapter David Newham and composer Daniel Deorksen, John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera comes rocketing through the centuries from 1728 and arrives looking as scrappy and scabrous as the day it was born.

In 1728, Gay lampooned Italian opera, which the English were fascinated with, by inverting its elitism to tell a story about whores and highwaymen, and by setting new lyrics to popular songs. As Deorksen notes in the program, the original must have felt a lot like a musical imagined by “Weird Al” Yankovic.

Many people know the plot and characters from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 adaptation, The Threepenny Opera. Mr. and Mrs. Peachum live off the avails of prostitution and theft, and turn their friends in for reward money. Their innocent daughter, Polly, marries the highwayman Macheath, a womanizer whose conquests include—conveniently, as it turns out—Lucy Lockit, niece to the warden of Newgate Prison.

Deorksen borrows briefly from Weill’s immortal “Mack the Knife” in “The Man Macheath”. But that reference is just a jumping-off point in the creation of an infectiously tumultuous jazz number. And when the Peachums’ servant, Filtch, shouts out his eponymous song, it’s a hilarious, head-slamming punk anthem.

Newham retains the antiquely carved texture of Gay’s language, but winnows the script into 10 sections he calls fantasias, each of which receives a different musical treatment from Deorksen. And Newham sets—and consistently realizes, thanks to his strong cast—a broadly performative style: the actors build physical characterizations out of iconic gestures and poses, and often address the audience directly.

Tallulah Winkelman, who plays Polly, is a whiz at making this work. In whiteface, her mouth a pink painted bow, Winkelman fills the large canvas of her physicality with pure, unaffected emotion. His eye makeup like large grey wings, Linden Banks is also particularly strong as he rides the razor of cynicism that is Peachum.

We have Maja Futrell-Frühling to thank for the ghoulish makeup, and Newham for the vibrant washes of colour in the lighting design. Deorksen, Phyllis Ho, Alan Bordeville, and Brian Knox McGugan knock out the music like cabaret pros.

There are quibbles—both act openers go on too long, for instance—but who cares? This show delivers so much.