Word: brecht
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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...
...based on books. Gypsy, which also opened last week, stars Tyne Daly of TV's Cagney & Lacey in a revival drawn from the memoirs of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Prince of Central Park, which quickly closed, derived from a book that had also prompted a made-for-TV movie. Brecht's own The Threepenny Opera, featuring rock star Sting as the seductive villain Macheath, is freely filched from British satirist John Gay's 1728 The Beggar's Opera. Sad to say, although each show could boast ingenious design and staging or beguiling acting, far from the best writers have been...
...Michael Bennett in their heyday. Tune takes a set more cluttered than Threepenny's -- fluted columns, a revolving door, dozens of chairs -- and weaves around it a ceaseless flow. If some of the wizardry is borrowed from bygone auteur directors, that is in keeping with the real meaning of Brecht's dictum: know enough to take the best from the best...
There is a nice irony in Brecht's ferocious parable of capitalist greed playing in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, that pillared temple of capitalist philanthropy. The parable itself, though, is rather silly. Brecht was a brilliant playwright and poet, but his ideas were pure Stalin-era blustering. As a viewer sits watching the hero Jimmy get executed for having been unable to pay his bar bill, he can only marvel at the gorgeous music Weill provided for this nonsense...
...first time around, Sweeney Todd, the gruesome tale of a deranged barber who slits customers' throats and a pragmatic landlady who bakes the victims into meat pies, was a Victorian penny dreadful by way of Brecht. Everything imitated him: Hugh Wheeler's book, Stephen Sondheim's score, Harold Prince's staging and even the set, which resembled an iron foundry; it hissed and clanged of the dehumanization of the Industrial Revolution. Audiences in 1979 flinched at the spewing blood and spoken bile: it seemed there had never been so cynical a musical...