Word: brecht
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...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...
...echoes of Brecht in this production are easily perceived--we are always conscious of being in a theater, always looking for the message...
Midmorning. "It has been a quiet revolution," the woman is saying. She is sixtyish, an actress in the Berliner Ensemble, the repertory theater founded by Bertolt Brecht. In the corner of the room, images flicker on the television screen. The pictures are of villas and hunting dachas and the commentator is talking about hundreds of millions of deutsche marks smuggled out of the country and into Swiss bank accounts...
...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...