Mein Gott! Josef Von Sternberg’s 1930 film The Blue Angel is a German expressionist classic best remembered for introducing the world to Marlene Dietrich. Just as the film’s aging Professor Wrath, played by Emil Jannings, becomes obsessed with Dietrich’s character, the sultry dancer Lola Lola, the filmgoing world was instantly entranced by Dietrich. (It probably helped that the film, one of the earliest notable talkies, was actually shot in both German and English-language versions rather than dubbed.) Capitalizing on Dietrich’s star power, some distributors hacked off Sternberg’s downer denouement, ending the the film with one of Dietrich’s songs instead.

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So: How will Scena Theatre’s “urban reimagining” of The Blue Angel end? You can find out tonight, when the new production gets a workshop premiere as part of the third and final weekend of the Intersections New America Arts Festival at H Street NE’s Atlas Performing Arts Center. (7 p.m., $15 / $10 for students, recommended for ages 16+.) Transposing the story from Weimar Germany to present-day Harlem, the international production combines the efforts of Scena artistic director Robert McNamara, who wrote the book and lyrics, with those of director Gabriele Jakobi and composer Achim Gieseler, both of whom are German. German film actor Armin Dillenberger plays Professor Wrath. The cast also includes several Howard University theater alum. The show will be performed again Saturday at 8:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m.

“It’s great to have this opportunity to do a German classic in an American context,” McNamara says. “The way [Gieseler] has updated the musical world of 1930 to 2011 is quite exciting.” McNamara says audiences will see 55 to 65 minutes of the in-progress show, which he’s hoping will premiere in its finished form in Berlin in April 2012. Earlier iterations of the show were workshopped in front of audiences in 1994 and 2007, McNamara says.

Don’t like Weimar cabaret or contemporary R&B? Fear not, free music in the Atlas lobby abides. Tonight’s Cafe Concerts include jazz singer Terri Allen at 6:30, midcentury country folk ensemble the Ordinaires at 8:30 and Brade Linde and Friends’ Open Jazz Jam Session at 10. Also on tonight’s docket are a pair of intriguing audio-visual collaborations: Six Impossible Things’s Mass. Ave. Redux “captures the cultural transverse of DC’s famed diagonal” in music and photography at 7 p.m. ($15/$10 students). At 9:30, Collide-O-Scope Music’s Noctilucent City melds electronic and piano music with improvised video and digital animation. That’s opposite an encore performance of Paige in Full (9:30, $10/$15 seniors & students), Paige Hernandez’s self-described “B-girl’s mixtape” using dance, hip-hop, poetry and film to chronicle her voyage exploring her African-American, Latino, and Asian roots. Paige in Full will also be performed Saturday at 6:30.