Word: brecht
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...CHARACTERS on the seedy stage of the Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill Threepenny Opera look out for themselves. An effective production of the unique hybrid of cabaret song, Broadway show, and revolutionary tract should leave you asking yourself whether you're any different. Brecht's script keeps up a steady fire of political comment, and his socialism slips in discreetly enough so that even American audiences in the '50s could stomach it. But it's Weill's brooding, often harsh music--so evocative of Weimar Germany's rotten core--that fixes The Threepenny Opera's world of human iniquity and mortality...
They come closest to it at the very beginning. As the light go up, cast members in rags spill out over the stage area and into the audience, assaulting, abusing, fondling, pickpocketing and beating each other. Here is Brecht's London writ small, and the streetsinger (Kermit Norris) croons the familiar "Mack the Knife" over it. But for some reason his costume has no tatters, and his delivery of the ballad is prim and affected. So much for anarchy and dissipation...
...underworld who's best friends with the chief of police strides through The Threepenny, Opera refusing to be judged. Women, of course, fall all over him, and he's married two (at least). Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, the "king of the beggars," a less familiar character, acts as Brecht's mouthpiece to deliver the show's straight-forward message: don't condemn how others earn their next meal until you're faced with missing one yourself. Working, begging, taking bribes, stealing--they blur together in Brecht's world. "What's robbing a bank compared to founding a bank," asks Macheath; "What...
Like Bertolt Brecht, whom he most nearly resembles, Horvath was interested in shopkeepers, merchants and petty shysters who either are trampled by history or must learn to turn tricks to survive. And like Brecht, Horváth was willing to work along plot lines that are shamelessly melodramatic and tearjerking...
Essays on surrealism, the mimetic faculty, Brecht and the Austrian polemicist Karl Kraus support Hannah Arendt's claim that Benjamin was the most important German critic between the world wars. His romantic attachment to anarchy and violence as messianic salvations may remind some readers of Norman Mailer at his steamiest. Yet at times, Benjamin's insights cast prophetic shadows. On the effect of film and advertising, for example: "Before a child of our time finds his way clear to opening a book, his eyes have been exposed to such a blizzard of changing, colorful, conflicting letters that...