Word: littlewood
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...WHAT A LOVELY WAR. Period songs, sketches, gauze-clad music-hall girls and blown-up film stills have the cumulative impact of an artillery barrage in Joan Littlewood's biting satire on World...
...WHAT A LOVELY WAR is an animated documentary that grins like a skull at the follies of World War I. Adding humor and song to pity and terror, Lovely War achieves a catharsis hardly to be believed of a musical. The hand that guides it is Joan Littlewood's; the guiding spirit is Bertolt Brecht...
...times E.S.T. achieves a catharsis hardly to be believed of a musical. The hand that guides it is Joan Littlewood's; the guiding spirit is Bertolt Brecht...
...firm hand that guides Lovely War is Joan Littlewood's, the musical's voice and mind are often Bertolt Brecht's. By decking her men and women in Pierrot and Pierrette outfits, she puts commedia dell'arte garb on the Brechtian notion that in the 20th century the individual is no longer a meaningful entity. It was Brecht, too, who recognized that a nostalgic song put in a satirical context could then be savored for its sentimentality even while it was being bitterly spoofed. Songs like Pack Up Your Troubles and Keep the Home Fires Burning...
...Anguish. The musical crowningly succeeds, just as Brecht did, by failing to observe two pet Brechtian laws: Do not let the audience indulge in an emotional binge. And teach it a lesson. The intended lessons of Mother Courage and Oh What a Lovely War are virtually identical. Brecht and Littlewood both argue that wars are engineered by knaves, fought and suffered by fools, and exploited by profiteers. But playgoers get a different message. They come away instead with heightened respect for the indomitability of the human spirit in adversity...