Word: brechtian
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...Brechtian Book. Still, in this disastrous season for musicals, the lesson of Pal Joey is clear - the book's the thing...
Musical comedies ignore that fact at their peril. John O'Hara's book has the spine of a skyscraper, with big-city sleaziness reflected in every panel of the glass-curtain wall. This is a Brechtian book in which a small-time heel, Joey (Christopher Chadman), with his naive boasts and shameless buttering-up, is letched onto by a rich, man-eating tigress named Vera (Joan Copeland), who loves him enough to stake him to a night club, but who coolly leaves him before he can leave...
...objecting, as some do, to the archaic language that Miller has used to suggest the historical period and create a Brechtian distance between audience and player. The chief agents are the use of "Mister" to address the men and of "Goody" (colloquialism for "Goodwife") to refer to the women, along with a lot of unusual third-person verb forms ("He have his goodness now"). But one has only to compare The Crucible with Shaw's Saint Joan--another play that climaxes with confession, recantation and martyrdom--to see how much greater a master of language the Briton...
...erotic poetry in motion that uncoils whenever Verdon and her sister in crime Velma Kelly (Chita Rivera) do their solos and duets. They pace the show with spunk incarnate. The chorus is jazzily bacchanalian, and Patricia Zipprodt's eye-riveting costumes swirl right out of a decadent Brechtian Berlin. Chicago is a cinch to take a bite out of the Big Apple...
...lapse into romanticism and self-indulgence which threatens to mar the film's authenticity, however, is avoided by the stark contrast of the black and white sequences. The intercutting of past as color and present as black and white functions as a sort of Brechtian alienation effect, distancing the viewer from the action in order to make him consider its implications. The black and white sequences, both in form and content, pose the question of the occupation's meaning for Frenchmen today. The dull crowds of people, the dark buildings, the depressing film studio--mundane scenes from the present--undercut...