{"id":53773,"date":"2017-03-01T15:50:42","date_gmt":"2017-03-01T20:50:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/?p=53773"},"modified":"2022-08-17T08:09:46","modified_gmt":"2022-08-17T12:09:46","slug":"new-rep-stages-brecht-on-brecht","status":"publish","type":"bu-article","link":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/news\/articles\/2017\/new-rep-stages-brecht-on-brecht\/","title":{"rendered":"New Rep Stages Brecht on Brecht"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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March 1, 2017<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t
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This article<\/a> was originally published by BU Today<\/h5>\n

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A pastiche of dramatic scenes and musical numbers by the prolific and politically brazen 20th-century German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Brecht<\/em> was conceived by Jim Petosa<\/a> in the 1980s for a theater company in Washington, D.C. The BU School of Theatre director has updated the revue for \u201cthese turbulent times,\u201d as he puts it, in a production at the New Repertory Theatre<\/a>. (The performance, with musical arrangement by the late George Tabori, opens with a seconds-long circular march, where the four-member cast cries, \u201cNasty pussy\u201d and \u201cNo wall.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Petosa, a College of Fine Arts professor, is staging Brecht on Brecht<\/em>, a School of Theatre and Boston Center for American Performance <\/a>(BCAP) coproduction, at New Rep\u2019s Black Box Theater at the Mosesian Center for the Arts in Watertown, where he is artistic director, through March 5. The production highlights the talents of CFA alumni and faculty in provocative performances reflecting the sensibility of the versatile and timeless writer who gave us such classics as The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and Her Children<\/em>, and Happy End<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In New Rep\u2019s cabaret-style production, each vignette and musical number spills seamlessly and speedily into the next with no intermission, and on opening night\u2014with one or two fleeting exceptions\u2014the audience palpably stifled any mid-performance applause. Theatergoers who consider themselves Brecht novices will hear inspired performances of familiar, widely interpreted classics such as \u201cMack the Knife\u201d and \u201cWhiskey Bar,\u201d deftly accompanied on piano by musical director Matthew Stern (CFA\u201916), a CFA lecturer.<\/p>\n

Brecht\u2019s writing was dominated by his criticism of \u201cblockhead bureaucrats\u201d and by impatient ridicule of the passivity of bystanders (the happy man, he wrote, is \u201cthe one who hasn\u2019t heard the bad news\u201d). Born in 1898, he began writing plays while working at an army hospital during World War I, which set the stage, so to speak, for his fearless antibourgeois, antiwar outlook. A Marxist, Brecht fled his native country in 1933 as the Nazis tightened their lethal grip on a nation in economic chaos. He eventually settled in the United States, returning to Berlin after World War II.<\/p>\n

\"h_butoday_Brecht_013-web\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To Petosa, who points to Brecht\u2019s \u201cpotent combination of political and social activism\u201d as an inspiration to future generations, the New Rep production reflects his favorite quote from the playwright: \u201cArt is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.\u201d He says Brecht on Brecht<\/em> wields that hammer anew, taking aim with poignancy and humor as well as rage. \u201cIt\u2019s a 90-minute phantasmagoria of Brechtian ideas,\u201d and a primer for the uninitiated, he says. Noting the playwright\u2019s legendary collaborations with Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, Petosa says that \u201cBrecht left a powerful legacy. His works are as vital now as they ever have been.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New Rep cast, clad in shabby, Weimar-era costumes and wearing clown noses that migrate to hats and lapels, includes Christine Hamel <\/a>(CFA\u201905) as \u201cmature woman,\u201d and Brad Daniel Peloquin as \u201cmature man.\u201d Carla Martinez makes her New Rep debut as \u201cyoung woman,\u201d and Jake Murphy (CFA\u201915) portrays \u201cyoung man.\u201d<\/p>\n

An accomplished voice and dialect coach as well as an actor, Hamel, a CFA assistant professor of voice and speech and of acting, is the director of Femina Shakes<\/a>, CFA\u2019s all-female troupe that experiments with aspects of sex and gender in Shakespeare\u2019s works.<\/p>\n

Peloquin, who has been a CFA voice faculty member, has performed musical theater throughout the Northeast, including with the Huntington Theatre Company<\/a>, and has sung at Marsh Chapel. He croons a haunting, slow-cooker version of \u201cMack the Knife,\u201d and Hamel delivers a stirring turn on the magical \u201cPirate Jenny\u201d (both written by Brecht and Weill for The Threepenny Opera<\/em>) from atop the grand piano, becoming a dark freighter\u2019s figurehead as the cast lifts her up for the finale.<\/p>\n

The delicately framed Martinez throws her entire body into her interpretation of \u201cSurabaya Johnny,\u201d from Happy End<\/em>, navigating its wrenching range of emotions. Several of the songs are sung in German, their meanings made clear by soft voice-overs.<\/p>\n

The nonmusical skits veer from heartbreaking to hilarious and pithy. In one of the evening\u2019s longer sketches, \u201cmature woman\u201d Hamel, a Jewish woman preparing to flee Nazi Berlin\u2014and her gentile husband\u2014for Amsterdam, makes a series of farewell phone calls, her attempts at breezy levity in the one-way conversations growing increasingly futile, and her intentions and reasons for fleeing increasingly clear. She addresses her emotionally distant spouse\u2014first in soliloquy, then in person\u2014and the audience realizes with the help of a single prosaic prop that she is not likely to return. In another segment, a poet who believes himself to be a truth-teller excoriates an unnamed regime that did not include his work on a banned book list. \u201cBurn me!\u201d he bellows.<\/p>\n\n\n

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This article was originally published by BU Today A pastiche of dramatic scenes and musical numbers by the prolific and politically brazen 20th-century German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Brecht was conceived by Jim Petosa in the 1980s for a theater company in Washington, D.C. The BU School of Theatre director has updated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4922,"featured_media":91129,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"bu_prepress_billboard":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term_manual":""},"tags":[],"bu-publication":[192],"magazine-article-category":[],"magazine-topic":[],"news-article-category":[329],"news-topic":[],"bu_edition":[],"media_type":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/53773"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/bu-article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4922"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53773"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/53773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91130,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/53773\/revisions\/91130"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53773"},{"taxonomy":"bu-publication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-publication?post=53773"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-article-category?post=53773"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-topic?post=53773"},{"taxonomy":"news-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-article-category?post=53773"},{"taxonomy":"news-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-topic?post=53773"},{"taxonomy":"bu_edition","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu_edition?post=53773"},{"taxonomy":"media_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media_type?post=53773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}