Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Over 100 Harvard and Radcliffe students tried out for parts in the Harvard Dramatic Club's 50th anniversary production of Bertolt Brecht's Good Woman of Setuzan...
...Bruckner-Ruggeberg; Colum-bia, 2 LPs). Composer Weill's widow Lotte Lenya (TIME, Aug. n) went to Berlin last winter to handpick and train singers, direct a 30th anniversary recording of the complete score (including some lusty, gutsy sections never before performed) for the first time in Bertolt Brecht's inimitable original German. The result is by far the best recorded recreation of Kurt Weill's jazzy, bitterly ironic score, with Singer Lenya herself heading a first-rate cast. Every sardonic, vulgar accent is in place, and despite the music's familiarity, it sounds as fresh...
...Weill renaissance is a strange phenomenon, for in many of his scores he simply echoed himself. Moreover, the lyrics by the late Marxist poet Bertolt Brecht, while brilliant in their own guttersnipe way, carry little of their original meaning for the U.S. in 1958: harsh cynicism can date as easily as gaslight sentimentality. Yet there is in the music-and in Lenya-a quality that defies time. "Threepenny Opera," she says, "will be good a hundred years from now. Corruption and poverty don't go out of fashion...
...Harvard Dramatic Club last night selected Chekhov's The Three Sisters and Bertolt Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan as its first two productions for next year...
...play, written in 1930, first produced in 1950, and translated into English by Eric Bentley in 1954, demands an operatic score such as Weill did for Brecht's The Three-Penny Opera and The Ja-Sager. Ned Stuart's brief original music for opening and closing is a step in the right direction, but references in the script to speeches as "songs" should have been deleted...