Word: brecht
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These esoteric oddities remind one that Brecht wrote this unusual play forty years ago, when he was in his early twenties. The young dramatist's Communism was as yet embryonic: The Chicago slums provide the location for his play, but only occasionally does he instruct his well-fed audience to "Look life straight in the eye." The play is less political and more metaphysical than maturer works like Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle...
...this speculative emphasis, In the Jungle of Cities is not a dated period piece. The Theatre Company of Boston expertly stages the play as it was meant to be produced in the twenties, and the result is contemporary drama as entertaining and puzzling as Genet, Ionesco, or latter-day Brecht...
HAPPY END (Columbia) is the puniest of the four small operas written by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. While it lacks the dramatic and social force of Three penny Opera, it can nearly match its songs. The work has never been better performed than in this version. Lotte Lenya, Weill's widow and faithful interpreter, memorably croaks Surabaya Johnny, Bilbao-Song, and other dirges from the shadows...
Painter Lindner grew up in the era of Brecht's social satire, of Max Beckmann's razor-sharp realism, of the street-fighting Weimar Republic, where a mark was worth less than a match...
...such linguistic collisions did not deter a genteel, bejeweled audience from giving Mahagonny a 30-minute ovation, despite the opera's fiercely stated argument that all wealth is wicked. "Rich Italians now consider it very smart and refined to like Brecht and Weill," one critic humphed, and another suggested that all the fat cats clapped only to confuse spies from the tax collector's office. But the curtain calls had nothing to do with socialist realism. Instead, they were a tribute to Gloria Davy and Gloria Lane, two American singers who made Mahagonny a triumph in any tongue...