Word: brecht
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Seven Deadly Sins is a period piece -the last collaboration (1933) between Refugee Berliners Weill and Brecht. The first went on to compose hit Broadway musicals, the other to be a literary showpiece for Communist Germany. Both are now dead. Their 1930s' cynicism, which is actually full of sentimentality and humor, survives as a work of satirical art that neither matched again...
...Good Woman is a preposterous "parable" that demonstrates you can't reconcile good and evil. The flame of goodness, however flickering, never expires. Yet evil is everywhere; so pervasive is evil that it lurks in goodness itself--in the blundering unwittingness of goodness. Specifically, Bertolt Brecht has written the story of an angelic prostitute (you never meet any other kind, on the stage, at least) who finds the wordly threats to her integrity so great she must mask herself as a loud-mouthed male. Thus better equipped to operate amid the avarice and lecheries of people, she can more effectively...
...this goes on in China. That fact doesn't seem very significant because Brecht seems to write with a dark Germanic humor and the English version which the Harvard Dramatic Club chose is by Eric Bentley, who never uses a foreign word when an American one will do. The colloquiality (?) of the piece is one of its charms...
...caricatures drawn on stage by the HDC are violent, rakish monstrosities whose antics are usually funny, especially when the actors slow down and give Brecht's witty asides a chance. Perhaps, as the run progresses, some will give their lines more of the broad irony that Brecht seems to intend. Others, particularly Eugene Pell, Richard Smithies, David Mills and Edith Iselin lay it on just right. And Claire Lu Thomas, portraying the angelic prostitute, manages to keep her sweet head in admittedly adverse circumstances (everybody picks on her because she's good...
Stefan Wolfe, a composer working for Brecht in Berlin, has written a musical score for the HDC production which premiers a new translation of the play by theater critic Eric Bentley...