sentences:  The project originated with black scenic designer Perry Watkins, who envisioned a jazz-driven adaptation of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera.Watkins hired John Latouche, who'd written lyrics for the cantata "Ballad for Americans" and "Cabin in the Sky," and teamed him with Ellington, still best known at the time as a band leader.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."