Word: weill
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tremendous scope for a director to exhibit his virtuosity. Jean-Claude van Itallie has not tried any tricks, but he has kept the production moving with smooth skill through John Beck's lavishly shabby set. Joseph Raposo's music borrows its manner and some of its substance from Kurt Weill, and like almost everything else about this production, it is just right...
...play, written in 1930, first produced in 1950, and translated into English by Eric Bentley in 1954, demands an operatic score such as Weill did for Brecht's The Three-Penny Opera and The Ja-Sager. Ned Stuart's brief original music for opening and closing is a step in the right direction, but references in the script to speeches as "songs" should have been deleted...
...markedly different guise of The Threepenny Opera, some of the same characters have long delighted theater audiences. Both the musical play, with a brilliant score by Brecht's friend Kurt Weill, and Brecht's novel stem from John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728). The novel was curiously ignored by U.S. reviewers when it appeared in translation in 1938 as A Penny for the Poor, possibly because its turn-of-the-century London setting scarcely conformed to the modish social-protest patterns of the '30s. Social protest the book certainly...
Died. Bertolt ("Bert") Brecht, 58, slight, bespectacled German playwright (librettist for Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera) who, according to ex-Communist Arthur Koestler, sold Marxism "with great brilliance and intellectual dishonesty" to "the snobs and parlor Communists" of Europe; of a heart attack; in East Berlin...
This was the story that Weill and Brecht turned into the despairing "Threepenny Opera," which showed the poor as helpless victims of the rich. The Drama Festival's production, while it retains the bawdy cynicism of the original, blunts the social satire; thus where Gay wrote "A woman knows how to be mercenary though she has never been to Court or the Palace," Richard Baldridge's adptation has it, "A woman knows how to be mercenary--it is in her nature." The all-over effect has been to turn the opera into a musical comedy, an eighteenth century "Guys...