Word: bertolt
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Bertolt Brecht, who plucked plots from Shakespeare, Moliere and Farquhar, reportedly said the best writers never borrow; they always steal. Brecht's error was limiting his dictum to the best writers. The rest are equally ready to find inspiration where someone else found it before. This is especially true of writers of musicals: attempts at original stories have become all but unheard of. With six weeks left, the '80s have yet to yield a noteworthy American musical not derived from another source, whether fiction (Big River), folklore (Into the Woods), movies ("Nine") or a painting (Sunday in the Park with...
...When Bertolt Brecht created his legendary Mahagonny, that "City of Nets" where every pleasure is for sale, he neglected to specify exactly where it was. It was originally thought to be the Nazi-threatened Berlin of the 1920s, but the libretto that he wrote for Kurt Weill's most ambitious opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), seems to be set on a wildly imaginary Florida Gold Coast. But to Jonathan Miller, the gifted British director who was commissioned to stage a new Mahagonny at the enterprising, young Los Angeles Music Center Opera, there could...
Some of the best and brightest left the country. Thomas Mann left, and Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Paul Tillich, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder. Some of the less fortunate fell into the hands of Goring's police and ended up in a little village outside Munich where the Nazis had built their first concentration camp. It was called Dachau. This was not yet the era of the gas chambers but rather of the truncheon, not mass murder but the gradual silencing of all opposition. "They came first for the Communists...
...Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill...
...rest of this season, though, BAM already has two very unusual projects in the works. The first, at the Majestic in March, is the Mahagonny Songspiel (1927) by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, a small-scale early draft of their corrosive parable, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The eccentric director Peter Sellars has eccentrically decided to combine this with the same singers performing eight Bach choral works. But the piece de resistance, which just finished two weeks of performances in Paris and is due in Brooklyn in May, is a 313-year-old opera that almost...