Word: bertolt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...both outlook and musical style, 200 Motels is an updating of the 1931 Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Instead of Brecht's thieves and prostitutes, however, Zappa gives us rednecks, rock stars, and groupies who populate a movie set that at times is supposed to pass for a small American town. ("Centerville--A Real Nice Place to Raise Your Kids Up.") The rock stars are, of course, the Mothers of Invention, all of whom portray themselves, except for Zappa, who rarely appears in the film, but is sometimes represented...
...Clowns" is the first act of the Polinskys' entertainment and, since it's written by Bertolt Brecht, it's also their one fling with a sure thing. Except that "Clowns" as adapted and performed by Theater Two is very minor Brecht indeed. Little more than a commercial of a parable in which it is demonstrated that even when acting under the banner of mutual aid men may actually be out to destroy each other. Case in point, a wooden dummy which the two clowns of the title systematically set about to dismantle. Since it's all over before...
...Bertolt Brecht in the throes of puppy love? Well, yes. Germany's polemical playwright had his silly side, according to Paula Banholzer, who had a son by Brecht 52 years ago when she was only seventeen. They had a beautiful time together, Paula reminisced to Germany's Der Spiegel. Once Brecht saw Paula at her second-story window and struck up a conversation; when his neck got stiff from looking up, he simply lay down in the street and continued chatting. As for Brecht's boast that being on a swing was as beautiful as making love...
...offered the script of a shrill melodrama entitled I Married a Communist. He refused to film it. Later he discovered that to his bosses at the old RKO studio, anyone who declined the project was politically suspect. Losey's political history-sponsoring Composer Hanns Eisler, supporting Playwright Bertolt Brecht, signing a friend-of-the-court brief for Producer Adrian Scott, one of the original Hollywood Ten-got him into serious trouble. Soon he was called to testify by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He never received the subpoena, he says, but all employment abruptly vanished. Losey left...
...wake of East Berlin's 1953 bread riots, the Communist regime scolded the people for having forfeited the government's confidence and demanded that they work twice as hard to atone. Marxist Dramatist Bertolt Brecht offered a classic rejoinder. Instead of trying to rehabilitate such people, asked Brecht sarcastically, "wouldn't it be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?" It remained for Czechoslovakia, nearly two decades later, to take Brecht at his word...