Word: brechtian
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...another new work in the Jeffrey repertory, Alvin Ailey's The Mingus Dancers, based on a grouping of ponderously orchestrated pieces by fabled Jazz Bassist Charlie Mingus. The work is an odd mixture of five abstractly modern sections and four stagey "vaudeville" routines, some comic, some gloomily Brechtian in flavor. They include a morose parade of grinning soldiers in clownlike, whiteface makeup, a lady from Spain heel-clacking through a campy flamenco, a pair of policemen mock-dueling with nightsticks. The vaudevilles have no discernible relationship to the abstract sequences-nor, for that matter, to the spirit...
Aint is a jumbled-up, quasi-Brechtian Harlem re-do of Elmer Rice's Street Scene. Manhattan has grown seedier, in or out of Harlem, since Rice wrote. The people talk tougher now, and are more frantic, more terribly frustrated...
Leonard Lehrman, not easily deflected in any endeavor or by any obstacle, mastered German in a summer in order to translate Days of the Commune, the only major play in the Brechtian canon unknown to English-speaking audiences. The Germans, fastidious in matters literary, rank this particular play as one of Brecht's three or four best. Brecht himself they mention in the same breath with Shakespeare and Goethe. One word about Lehrman: music comes just as easily as instant linguistic virtuosity to this Dunster House dynamo. Having studied piano seven years under Elie Siegmeister, Lehrman has for the past...
...inserted six more songs by Eisler and the Communist anthem "Internationale" to make Commune more fully music-drama ( Theater mit Musik ). He justifies the increased emphasis on music not solely as a concession to American sensibility, but as the "use of a Wagnerian technique to make it [ Commune ] more Brechtian...
Blanket Indictments. The play, like that vision, finally falls apart. The point of collapse comes when Mrs. Hasseltine withdraws her charges against Millington and turning on the assembled officers, says, "You are scum." Playwright England hasn't prepared the audience for anything like that, either as a Brechtian blast at the military or in terms of the actual behavior of the officers involved. It refutes common sense to make blanket indictments of any group of men, whether they be army officers, policemen or stockbrokers. The person most qualified to know this is Mrs. Hasseltine herself, who has traded...