Word: begbick
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...plot, which rivals "Candide" in its implausibility, centers around three American fugitives, the Widow Begbick (Valerie Eaton), Trinity Moses (Bob Grady), and Fatty the Procurist (Eric Aubin), who in a desperate attempt to make money found a city of pleasure in the desolate Alabama wilderness. The trio invent the name "Mahagonny," (meaning "city of nets," according to the characters) and fill the city with workers, criminals, pimps and prostitutes, offering weary adventurers a life of pure hedonism. "Mahagonny," like Brecht himself, is decidedly anti-capitalist and even anarchistic, and the doomed city exemplifies the amazing freedoms and pleasures...
...Bloody Five's moods, including his bewilderment as his grip on reality slips further and further away. A complement to Bloody Five's hysteria is the cool and calculating Widow saloon, who handles Bloody Five with nerves of steel and a hunger for money. Catherine Steindley's portrayal of Begbick is campy and shrill, but at times she reveals a vulnerability and sense of loss which, though not strictly Brechtian, is a welcome respite for the audience...
...thrust upon hits because the soldiers fear annihilation by their brutish sergeant, Bloody Five, whom pleasure is in others' punishment. Though his bluster and machismo parody his he-man style, Bloody Five is in truth as cruel as his nickname. His power overwhelms everyone but the camp follower, Widow Begbick. She knows the weakness intrinsic to all men especially strong ones, and eventually triggers Five's disgrace. Bloody Five's bravura balances Galy's passive foolishness. As surely as the latter metamorphoses into the army beast, the former weakens and falls. It's grim stuff of which to make laughter...
...chance to show his evolution. As Bloody Five, Tim Manna struts and bellows, though in his efforts to growl, his lines occasionally garble. Marty Shofner, Richard Bertelson, and Steve Craddock make a good Three Stooges team, and their casual violence fits their uniforms. By avoiding Widow Begbick's slattern stereotype, Claudia Carter does Brecht's characterization one better. Parkman Howe, as a monk cum con artist, skitters away with his part of the show. He turns that original missing private into a God then, with religio-carnival patter, fobs him off on the masses. One wishes Brecht had written...
...anything, intensified this somewhat incongruous vaudeville element (wholly serived. I deem, from American productions of Die Dreigroschenoper): marquee lights glitter from the proscenium, news of each scene is projected on a screen from slides (a Ia Chaplin), and poor old Maggie Ziskind, cast as the Widow Leosadia Begbick, a saloon-keeping trollop, has to bundle up in ratty Lotte Lenya togs and belt out a couple of those sour songs that were Mrs. Weill's stock-in-trade. (The words for most of these songs are by Mr. Bentley, the music--as Wall-ish as a composer of Sing Musel...
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