Word: berliner
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...HELL WITH posterity: I write for today," Kurt Weill remarked about the period during which he was writing The Threepenny Opera. But 44 years after its premiere in the Berlin Goebbels had just told "you're going to have a lot of fun with us," the opera is unfortunately as powerful and pointed as ever, with no end in sight...
...North Vietnamese were active too. One day last week North Vietnamese envoys in Prague, Warsaw, Bucharest, Belgrade, Budapest and East Berlin simultaneously requested audiences with the party leaders of the Eastern European Communist nations, all of whom had been pressing Hanoi to make a settlement. Presumably the East Europeans were pleased with the briefings, for the North Vietnamese diplomats drove back to their embassies with renewed promises of bloc support...
...Antonov-10 crashed near Kharkov in the Ukraine, killing 108, many of them children on their way to summer holiday camp. In addition to the three Aeroflot tragedies, 156 people died in the crash of a Soviet-manufactured Ilyushin-62, operated by Interflug, the East German airline, near East Berlin last August...
Susan Ehrlich and Pam Berlin stand out for their performances as Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Martin, respectively. Both of them convey a certain sense of painful and proper English sensibility without losing the pace of their lines. Paul Ling began his role as Mr. Smith very tensely, which became more appropriate as the play itself became more tense, but was initially somewhat awkward. Jean Kalavski babbled as the maid Mary in a relatively minor role that she handled well. Lindsay Davis's direction was equally competent; though he introduced nothing particularly novel into the performance...
While the Berlin section of the evening is less well done, it is more meaningful because Weill's collaborator was Bertolt Brecht. Between them they fashioned a dramatic rhetoric of music and lyrics that moved with deceptive ease from the beat of the goose step to the glide of the tango. Decadence was their target, but they were half in love with what they hated; Weill could decant sin from a saxophone. The music that he later composed in the U.S. somehow lacks that moral bite that Brecht inspired...