Word: kathchen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...they shouldn't. Their Devil is Pegleg, a swallow- tailed lowlife who learned his wiles behind the footlights of some sleazy Weimar cabaret, a la Joel Grey. They are surrounded by weirdos who make the Addams Family look like the Waltons. Among them: Wilhelm's inamorata, the robotically hysterical Kathchen; her fright-wigged father Bertram; an overbearing uncle who, in a hilarious non sequitur, tells the story of how Hemingway sold the movie rights to The Snows of Kilimanjaro; and a dead ancestor in Boris Karloff makeup whose only advice to the living is, "Do what thou wilt...
...separates the mordant from the maudlin. On the one hand, there's November, a bitter hymn to the month that "only believes in a pile of dead leaves/ And a moon that's the color of bone." On the other, there's I'll Shoot the Moon, in which Kathchen, daydreaming about her lover, vows to "be the pennies on your eyes" and "build a nest in your hair...
...wonderfully served by 12 actors (who mix German and English) from Hamburg's experimental Thalia Theater. As Kathchen, Annette Paulmann is truly incomparable: it's safe to say that nothing like her combination of sexuality and idiocy has ever been seen before. As Wilhelm, Stefan Kurt is equally good with both Buster Keaton looniness and the melodramatic pathos into which he collapses after losing his mind (and, again, his trousers). Nobody has ever made sliminess more winning than Dominique Horwitz as Pegleg. True to his show-biz heart, he doesn't disappear inside his 10-ft.-tall black coffin until...
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