JENNY Sealey, co-director of the London 2012 Paralympics Opening Ceremony, is now holding the same post for an anarchic new version of The Threepenny Opera at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds.

The Playhouse has teamed up not only with Graeae, Britain's foremost disabled-led theatre company, but also with three regional theatres, Nottingham Playhouse, Birmingham Repertory Theatre and the New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich, for a topical touring production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's play about the downtrodden and dispossessed.

Jenny Sealey and New Wolsey artistic director Peter Rowe are overseeing this large-scale musical comedy, reinvented for our times of financial insecurity and grinding poverty. Never has there been a more relevant time for a fresh exploration of society’s reaction to surviving economic hard times and allowing the social under-dogs to have their say, reckon the directors.

The Threepenny Opera's story of London’s most notorious criminal, Macheath, marrying Polly, daughter of Jonathan Peachum, leader of the beggars, will be performed by a motley company of contemporary beggars, alias "an explosive mix" of opera singers and actor-musicians, both disabled and non-disabled. The show also will use live audio description, British Sign Language and captioning.

Rowe and Sealey are collaborating for a third time, having worked together previously on The Flower Girls and Reasons To Be Cheerful.

Running alongside The Threepenny Opera will be a programme of events curated by the Playhouse that will explore disability and diversity in the arts. These include post-show discussions on Wednesday night with the cast and after May 3's matinee with guest speakers Jo Verrent and Lynn Manning, West Yorkshire equality and diversity guru and Los Angeles poet, playwright, actor and former world champion of blind judo respectively.

Skeleton Wumman, the latest in the Playhouse series of A Play, A Pie And A Pint short plays, will be performed from April 29 to May 3 in Scots-English and British Sign Language. Written and directed by Gerda Stevenson, this contemporary drama with live music draws on traditional creation myths, combining the Inuit sea goddess Sedna and Skeleton Woman with the story of a disabled young Scottish teenager.

The Threepenny Opera runs from tonight until May 10 with performances at 7.30pm, Tuesday to Saturday and on Monday, April 28, plus 1.30pm on Thursday and 2pm on both Saturdays. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or at wyp.org.uk