Word: brecht
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Perhaps "culture" is the wrong word to describe what goes on. Perhaps not even Bertolt Brecht, who knew the middle class hates to be reminded that its comfortable life is political, could make it interesting. It is a land characterized by the atmosphere of a San Clemente golf club locker room; golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism. It is a land of Jack Daniels and Vietnamese maids, of luxurious home sprinkler systems, of helicopters which hover over the city to catch purse snatchers making their...
...savage intensity of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's script and score, probably already familiar to many who will attend this production, director R.J. Cutler sharpens considerably with a raw-edged style of acting and "the meanest nastiest filthie to translation we could find," says one lead. Like the lyrics to the "anti-operatic songs, some of the combative harshness in the acting makes the audience shift uneasily. But it gives them at the same time the feeling that Cutler & Co. meant their skin to crawl this...
...visible orchestra emphasizes the sublime marriage of Brecht's text to Weill's music. The two independent elements complementing each other set forth the positions and ideas presented in each, most notably in the ballads. The ballads, more than the text itself, state the characters' situations objectively. Cutler's staging for these ballads underscores their epic nature; they are the strongest cohesive element of the production. The Second Threepenny Finale: What Keeps Mankind Alive?, which closes the second act, encapsulates the message of the play, "Food is the first thing. Morals follow on." Rarely has the persistence...
...characters' presentation determines the effectiveness of Brecht's message, as assignment this production maintains overall. Ernest Kearns' Mr. Peachum has all the disgusting elements of the petit-bourgeois, and Kearns presents Peachum with a clear understanding of the action-provoking role. Because of the flatness with which Kearns delivers statements sympathetic to Brecht--"The law was made for the rich to exploit those who don't understand it"--he maintains distance from his character. In his dryness and his logic, his running about and his posing, Kearns reduces the "Beggar's Friend" to a common demoninator, strips him down...
...Empathy. While well-acted, this production of Threepenny Opera lacks a social awareness of the play's context intrinsic to the epic theater. As if fearing to offend an audience too used to pleasurable theater and unwilling to be taught, Cutler has dismantled most of the instructive apparatus of Brecht's theater. But for the second Threepenny Finale, the placards bearing song and scene titles--the visual, literal representation necessary for didacticism--are wanting. While the narrator (Lars-Gunnar Wigemar), a ballad-singer, stalks about the stage describing subsequent scenes, this is not enough. He simply reduces the value...