Word: brecht
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This is a corrosively funny novel about business chicanery. Its unlikely author: a Communist with an irrepressible sense of humor. In Threepenny Novel, the late German Playwright and Novelist Bertolt Brecht takes the position that business is crime conducted in an aura of respectability. His book is somehow engaging despite this classic Marxist idea, because of its raffishly vital characters who make all the Cash McCalls in their grey flannel suits seem as sedate, proper and wooden as the paneling of their executive suites...
Died. Bertolt ("Bert") Brecht, 58, slight, bespectacled German playwright (librettist for Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera) who, according to ex-Communist Arthur Koestler, sold Marxism "with great brilliance and intellectual dishonesty" to "the snobs and parlor Communists" of Europe; of a heart attack; in East Berlin...
This was the story that Weill and Brecht turned into the despairing "Threepenny Opera," which showed the poor as helpless victims of the rich. The Drama Festival's production, while it retains the bawdy cynicism of the original, blunts the social satire; thus where Gay wrote "A woman knows how to be mercenary though she has never been to Court or the Palace," Richard Baldridge's adptation has it, "A woman knows how to be mercenary--it is in her nature." The all-over effect has been to turn the opera into a musical comedy, an eighteenth century "Guys...
...Stories-starvation side by side with luxury, Nazi and Communist bullyboys in the streets, cynicism as heavy as the makeup on the faces of the omnipresent prostitutes. The Threepenny Opera echoed that city. Vaguely based on John Gay's 18th century original, the German libretto by Poet Bert Brecht (now a propaganda wheel in East Germany) had a vicious underdog snarl ("First fill our bellies, then talk morality") and magnificent, vulgar humor. Like the rest of the work, Mack the Knife* was a bitter satire of society and of schmalzy, popular music; it gave a ragtime catalogue of murder...
...opera represents a courtroom trial in the afterworld, in which the newly dead Roman general Lucullus pleads his case for admission to the Elysian Fields. The libretto, originally written as a radio play in 1936, is by Germany's Red poet Bert (ThreePenny Opera) Brecht, but its only ideological message is antimili-tarism (the Communists condemned the text in 1951 as too "unpolitical"). In a stunning setting of blocks and planes, Lucullus faces a jury of five pale shades: courtesan, teacher, baker, farmer and fishwife. His character witnesses are stone-relief figures from the frieze that decorates his tomb...