Word: brecht
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Verhoeven zips through his tangled story with all the brio of Brecht on a sunny day; his style is comic, ironic, daringly distanced. The girlhood scenes are played for easygoing farce and shot in black and white. Then the film bursts into snapshot color when Sonja falls in love with her teacher (Robert Giggenbach). Her hometown's streets and churches are stylized back projections. The Nasty Girl moves like an eccentric dancer, ever shifting its pace and mood, never losing its poise...
...season, winning an Olivier Award, and makes its U.S. debut at California's Berkeley Repertory Theater. The language is vernacular, sometimes vulgar, and even titled characters are stripped of grandeur and persiflage. The multiracial casting reflects contemporary America more than feudal Spain. Stylistically, the 20th century influence of Bertolt Brecht is evident throughout in the Marxist class analysis, didactic political sloganeering and use of song and dance to preach...
...fratricidal ordeal known as the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), the French, Swedes and other nations joined in playing out their political and religious rivalries on German soil. Much of Germany was devastated and the starving survivors reduced to misery. In one of his best plays, Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht sketched the scene: "The religious war has lasted 16 years, and Germany has lost half its inhabitants. Those who are spared in battle die by plague. Over once blooming countryside, hunger rages. Towns are burned down. Wolves prowl the empty streets...
...acclaimed stage shows from East and West Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Bremen, Bochum and Schwerin. All were imported for, or staged locally to enrich, last month's Berlin Theatertreffen, the city's 27th annual festival of productions from around the German-speaking world. Although the doctrinaire Marxism of Bertolt Brecht, Germany's greatest 20th century playwright, has fallen out of fashion, his zeal to shake up bourgeois spectators still seems to inspire his artistic successors...
...German theater is also its weakness: the primary creative figure is the director, not the writer or actor, and thus style, imagery and "concept" dominate the more human appeals of having a story and finding an emotional way to tell it. Performers are often treated like puppets. In staging Brecht's A Man's a Man for the Thalia Theater of Hamburg, director Katharina Thalbach encased the actors in masks and bodysuits so that they resembled cartoons. Playwrights, too, often find their vision subordinated to directors'. This year's Theatertreffen included two contemporary plays that were...