Word: brecht
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Swiss rescuer Heinz Brecht said his team had used trained dogs to locate five survivors Saturday. But he said the work was difficult because of the scale of the destruction...
...acting in the movie seems stiff and wooden, it is because the characters are being asked to play paradigms rather than people. Each character typifies a different ideology, so the movie becomes as heavily symbolic as a Brecht musical. The actors slog through the transition from hyper-realstic to symbolic looking rather bewildered...
...absurdist British comedy, N.F. Simpson's One Way Pendulum; a Jacobean tragedy, Bussy D'Ambois; a Leonard Bernstein musical, Candide, which Miller says "will have more flavor of the original Voltaire"; and Shakespeare's The Tempest. Also on the roster are Reinhold Lenz's The Tutor, adapted by Brecht, and Alexander Ostrovsky's 19th century Russian comedy Too Clever By Half. "I want to break out of the stale convection current that keeps endlessly recirculating the same old Shaw and Chekhov," says Miller. "We are part of Europe, and there are vast expanses of European literature unknown to London audiences...
...They point up the parallels between 19th and 20th century imperialism with sly, casually dislocating anachronisms. Accompanied by a rock score, Coke bottles, North American magazines carrying cover stories about Walker's exploits, even a Marine helicopter all turn up at ! the strangest moments. At best one thinks of Brecht's presentational theater, at worst (not often) of Saturday Night Live. At all times one is glad to see the spirit of youthful subversion alive, applied to a sober subject -- and looking bankable to a major studio...
Roland Tec's music, composed for this production, tends to work against the play's attempt to evoke '20s Chicago. Though jazzy, it sounds too much like '40s bebop. The scat singing between scenes is clearly not spontaneous. Not that Tec's music should sound like frequent Brecht collaborator Kurt Weill's, but it adds little and even detracts from the atmosphere...