Word: beggar
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...catastrophe doesn't rule out heroism--in fact, even Colonel Quoc has his moments of humanity. "I'm not really so terrible," he tells an American colleague. "Sometimes when I pass a beggar I don't spit, and maybe even give him a coin." Fighter Kim, tortured by Americans determined to find out who blew up their friends the week before, strangles a companion whose capacity for resistance he doubts, slits his own wrists and lies down quietly to die. And Grandmother Pan survives the catastrophe to rummage among the rubble for her husband's legs. Maybe in certain circumstances...
...VIENNA of Measure for Measure is something like the London of The Beggar's Opera, a city where ordinary people have no recourse from the justice of their betters, except in miraculous happy endings. The City Center used almost the same set for both plays, and when the costumes for Measure for Measure weren't just cutely 19th century, they emphasized the resemblance too--the prostitutes in Vienna's red-light district, as the program helpfully labels what Shakespeare calls "A Street," could just as well be Londoners...
...BEGGAR'S OPERA is as immediately biting as they come. Originally produced in 1728, in a London where starving people were hanged for stealing a shilling's worth of property, it tells about a gang of thieves, fences and jailers supposedly much like the high officials who surrounded Horace Walpole, the first prime minister of England. From time to time, the characters explain that they are at least more honest than England's unpunished rich people, but mostly they're too busy trying to sell each other out. At the end, Macheath the highwayman--the original of Weill...
...mistake. "One may know by your Kiss, that your Gin is excellent," Mr. Peachum remarks, but his less capable daughter can only explain sorrowfully that she can't stop loving her husband--and that, coupled with the wit implicit in a good production, is what carries The Beggar's Opera beyond cynicism into anger...
...City Center Acting Company from New York City is doing three plays at Brandeis this week--Anton Chekhov's The Three Sisters (Saturday), John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (tomorrow), and William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (today, with an extra performance at 11:30 this morning). It's a good company, and they're all good plays. 8:30 p.m., Spingold Theater at Brandeis...