Blog 9
Everyone is happy to be back from Spring Break and ready for more Break… uh no, I meant to say, more Brecht.
For the remainder of the semester we will be examining The Three Penny Opera, which was the first really big success for Brecht’s concept epic theater in 1928. Last week, we started with a report over act one, which brought up the point of eating a fish with a knife. Mac reproaches Jake for eating a trout with a knife, saying that anybody who would to that is just a plain swine. It became clear that Mac could have profited with a few lessons from Uwe Fenner on the proper use of silverware in a formal setting, or by watching "Guter Stil & Etikette mit Uwe Fenner":
If Mac only spoke English, he could have spent some time with Nancy Mitchel:
Either way, Mac would have been less likely of looking like a swine himself.
Monday 4/4/11, we watched part of Die Dreigroschenoper on DVD. There have been several movie versions of Brecht’s play, but the one we are watching is the first – The 1931 version directed by G. W. Pabst, which does not exactly follow the stage play nor Brecht's screenplay a movie. From a first glance, it appears that many of Weill’s songs have been cut from Pabst's movie. It has been suggested that Pabst made the cuts to Brecht's screen version in order to improve the flow and continuity of his movie. As you may suspect, Pabst's changes did not sit well with Bertolt. In fact, Brecht filed a lawsuit to block the showing of the film. In the end, the courts judged in favor of Pabst but in 1933, the nazis banned the play, the movie and Bertolt Brecht in Hitler's Germany.
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