Word: brecht
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
During the '30s Hollywood became a roost for an astonishing assortment of wanderers and political refugees. Playwright Bertolt Brecht despised Hollywood but scuttled about trying to get work (his evil city Mahagonny, a net for pleasure lovers, gives Friedrich his title). Igor Stravinsky, Friedrich relates, tried to write movie music but never succeeded. When Producer Irving Thalberg offered $25,000 for a score for The Good Earth, the distinguished and threadbare atonalist Arnold Schoenberg demanded $50,000 and the right to direct the actors, who, he felt, should chant their lines...
...Kurt Weill, these are among the composer's most familiar. The soprano's increasingly raw voice is not entirely suitable to the works of the American period, like the wistful waltz Foolish Heart, from One Touch of Venus. But it is just right for the angry desperation of the Brecht-Berlin years; the harsh, bitter edge to the smoky Surabaya-Johnny proclaims there will be no happy end here...
HARVARD THEATERGOERS have seen their fair share of bizarre dramatic mutations--these days, no one dares balk at Shakespeare staged as a Sid Vicious rock opera or Brecht in a dormitory bathtub. Unfortunately, original student-written plays never seem to find equal stage time...
...kings and governments through their work. Yeats, unpolitical as anyone could look in his fluffy neckties, wrote stinging political lines. As did Robert Lowell. As does Seamus Heaney. W.H. Auden's September 1, 1939 is a beautiful muddle of a poem on Europe in the shadow of war. Bertolt Brecht's To Posterity, about Germany under the Nazis, is clear as a bell...
Indoors, Ashland's shows range from Brecht's Threepenny Opera to a contemporary American comedy, Eric Overmyer's On the Verge, which has never been staged in New York City but has been taken up by a dozen or so regional theaters. This puckish story of three 19th century women explorers who find themselves jolted forward to the 1950s needs a more eventful second act and a quicker ending, but it muses beguilingly about culture shock, imperialism and the meaning, or meaninglessness, of language...