Word: arturo
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...Resistible Rise of Arturo...
...beginning of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Professor Richard Hunt, who teaches a Core course called "Culture and Society in Weimar and Nazi Germany," delivers a short lecture on Brecht, while a rogues gallery of Nazi thugs, whom Brecht's parable has transformed into Chicago gangsters, listens in bemusement. "It is a very serious play. It is also a very funny play," Hunt says of Ui itself. Then one of the gangsters motions Hunt offstage and shoots...
...Hunt says, Ui is both serious and funny. And as his sudden demise suggests, it is not subtle. Almost all the characters are none-too-thinly veiled portraits of real figures in the Nazi hierarchy. Hitler becomes Arturo Ui (Chad Raphael), Ernst Roehm becomes Ernesto Roma (Jeff Alexander), Hermann Goering becomes Emanuele Giri (David Schrag) and Joseph Goebbels becomes Giuseppi Givola (Anthony Korotko Hatch...
...Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a daunting play, more because of its length (two hours and 45 minutes), its large cast of characters, its blank verse and its strange music, rather than its theme. Still, it is worth seeing for its acting. And it proves the old adage: You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word...
Written by modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht and an allegory for the rise of Nazism in Weimar Germany, this work marks not only the resistible rise of Arturo Ui but also the rise of a direction/production trio. The three have done several other productions together in the past, including last year's hit The 5th of July, are good friends and they even live in the same entry way of Leverett House. But all agree that the sheer logistics of a mainstage production require a different approach...