Word: bertolt
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...extraordinary gathering, if only for the new talent on display. Andre Malraux, Boris Pasternak, Andre Gide, Bertolt Brecht--all had come together at the International Writers' Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris during June of 1935, to protect the rise of fascism in Europe. These were the so-called "engaged writers," men and women who believed that art and politics go hand in hand, that one cannot exist without the other. In the fact of Hitler's spreading madness, they held rallies, made speeches, organized...
DIED. Lotte Lenya, 83, raspy-voiced, Austrian-born musical actress best known for performing, and later resuscitating, works of Composer Kurt Weill, her first husband; of cancer; in Manhattan. Lenya's signature role, which she premiered in Weimar Berlin, was the prostitute Jenny in Bertolt Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera. The Weills fled Nazism for the U.S. and, especially after Weill's death in 1950, Lenya renewed her career on the Broadway stage (Cabaret) and in spoofy films (From Russia With Love). Said Music Critic Harold Schonberg: "She can put into a song an intensity...
Perhaps "culture" is the wrong word to describe what goes on. Perhaps not even Bertolt Brecht, who knew the middle class hates to be reminded that its comfortable life is political, could make it interesting. It is a land characterized by the atmosphere of a San Clemente golf club locker room; golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism. It is a land of Jack Daniels and Vietnamese maids, of luxurious home sprinkler systems, of helicopters which hover over the city to catch purse snatchers making their...
...savage intensity of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's script and score, probably already familiar to many who will attend this production, director R.J. Cutler sharpens considerably with a raw-edged style of acting and "the meanest nastiest filthie to translation we could find," says one lead. Like the lyrics to the "anti-operatic songs, some of the combative harshness in the acting makes the audience shift uneasily. But it gives them at the same time the feeling that Cutler & Co. meant their skin to crawl this...
With this jarring first image, the current production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera captures the cardinal principle of epic theater: a rigid separation between the stage and spectator. This separation, or alienation, prevents the spectator from identifying with the characters. Brechtian theater presents man for scrutiny, to entertain and instruct the spectator. Didactic in intent, it forces him to observe, make decisions, and act on them. Under R.J. Cutler's direction, Threepenny Opera shines with all the power and excitement inherent in Epic theater...