Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was not the most successful stage work of Playwright Bertolt Brecht and Composer Kurt Weill (The Threepenny Opera has consistently attracted more attention), but it was by all odds their most ambitious collaboration. At its 1930 premiere in Leipzig, its jazzy score and slangy libretto, combined with Nazi-inspired resentment of its Jewish composer and its left-wing theme, touched off one of the worst riots in the history of the German theater. Rarely performed since then, Mahagonny was revived last week by the Heidelberg Municipal Theater in a stark and moving...
Caricature Capitalism. Both Weill and Brecht, recalls Weill's widow, Singer Lotte Lenya, were fascinated by the America they knew "from books, movies, popular songs, headlines-the America of the garish Twenties, with its Capones, Texas Guinans, Aimee Semple MacPhersons, Ponzis, and the Murderess Ruth Snyder." The mythical city of Mahagonny (pronounced mah-hah-ge-nee) was a symbol of that imaginary America, and the city's reason for being was summed up in the name of its principal hotel: the Here-You-May-Do-Anything Inn. The opera's songs marked a turning point for Composer...
...orchestra of only 30 players was heavy on winds rather than strings, managed to re-create with remarkable skill the tinny, strident sound of oldtime jazz bands. The opera's cast of criminals, procurers and prostitutes were re-creations of the fantasy Americans dreamed up by Socialist Brecht. Their anarchic world was a caricature of turn-of-the-century capitalism...
...Brecht on Brecht. An oasis for patched minds where teh playgoer may sip the aphorisms, songs,scenes, and poems of a powerful master of 20th century theater...
...Brecht on Brecht generates dramatic excitement from a revue-styled montage of the songs, poems, scenes, and aphorisms of a 20th century master of theater...