Word: mah
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...Brecht, recalls Weill's widow, Singer Lotte Lenya, were fascinated by the America they knew "from books, movies, popular songs, headlines-the America of the garish Twenties, with its Capones, Texas Guinans, Aimee Semple MacPhersons, Ponzis, and the Murderess Ruth Snyder." The mythical city of Mahagonny (pronounced mah-hah-ge-nee) was a symbol of that imaginary America, and the city's reason for being was summed up in the name of its principal hotel: the Here-You-May-Do-Anything Inn. The opera's songs marked a turning point for Composer Weill-away from atonality toward...
...CRIPPLE MAH AND THE NEW ORDER (23 I pp.)-C. Y. Lee-Farrar, Straus & Cudahy...
...burlesque by C. Y. Lee, the Chinese-American author of The Flower Drum Song. Lee's view is light, slight and frequently funny, but it is that of an established expatriate; it lacks the edge that defiance and fear give to a work whose author risks arrest. Cripple Mah, Lee's addlepated hero, is protected by his Schweikian stupidity from the dangers of the new people's democratic dictatorship. There is no sense of immediacy; the reader feels Mah could equally well be blundering through the tumultuous 13th century China described in the picaresque classic, Flower Shadows...
...kind of woman trouble that Boccaccio wrote about constantly besets the heroes of Chinese novels, and Mah's are both traditional and up to date; they are caused by the government's Cup of Water movement. To increase the population, it has been decreed that women are like fountains: if anyone is thirsty, he drinks from the nearest one. Mah is peacefully attending to his duties as the custodian of a temple to Mao (formerly a temple to Confucius) when his room is invaded by a Female Old Tree Trunk (party member of long standing) who is pregnant...
When Liberation Mah is born, the Tree Trunk disappears, and Cripple Mah sets out with the baby and an old billy goat, which he had purchased under the impression that it was a nanny, to seek his fortune in Peking. It is not long before he is supporting another Comrade Sweetheart. Even in a progressive state, this is one cup of water too many, and soon Mah finds himself in a corrective labor camp, being washed of bigamous thoughts. Everything turns out well, just in time for the second-act curtain. Says San Franciscan Lee, who last saw his native...