The Beggar's Opera

From Rachel Buchman (Frau Peachum):

The following introduction comes from a copy of The Beggar's Opera I picked up in NYC at the end of the summer. Beggar's Opera by John Gay is the opera that Threepenny very closely follows. This introduction explains much about the historical characters, the underworld society the characters operate in, the meaning of some of the vocabulary and so on.

Other resources that are worth investigating:

NOVELS:

Berlin Alexanderplatz by Doblin

[It takes place in Weimar Berlin]

Moll Flanders by Defoe

Takes place in London in the 1720's, the time of The Beggar's Opera and graphically deals with the life of beggars, whores, and thieves. It really brings to life many of the people and circumstances depicted in Threepenny. It is also an unintentionally enlightening and sympathetic portrait of women in early 18th century society.

FILM:

Berlin Alexanderplatz- German television series based on the book, directed by Fassbinder

Threepenny Opera- movie version directed by Pabst (from 1931)

ART:

Collection of George Grosz's drawings and paintings entitled "Ecce Homor."

CLICK images to read! !

The Beggar's Opera by John Gar; Penguin Classics Edition

Published: 1986, London/NY

Past Production Research- Threepenny on Broadway

'Threepenny Opera' Brings Renewed Decadence to Studio 54

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/theater/reviews/21thre.html

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper in "The Threepenny Opera."

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By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: April 21, 2006

AND you thought those crazy, hazy nights when Studio 54 sizzled were strictly a thing of the past. Think again, disco boys and girls. Why right now — on the very spot where Halston, Liza, Bianca and Andy once held sybaritic court — you can watch the same kinds of revels they might have witnessed in the 1970's, thanks to the shrill, numbing revival of "The Threepenny Opera" that opened at the theater at Studio 54 last night.

Audio Slide Show: A Shiny 'Threepenny'

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Ana Gasteyer, left, Nellie McKay and Jim Dale in "The Threepenny Opera," at Studio 54.

Cross-dressed men and women in writhing sexual pretzels; leather boys and glitter queens vacuuming up piles of snow with their nostrils; strobe lights, neon lights and, yes, disco-ball lights. There's even a bare-chested hunk in a gold lamé bathing suit who arrives on a flying golden horse, summoning sweet memories of that fab birthday party for Bianca. (Or was it Liz?) All of this is once again on tap via the Roundabout Theater Company.

There's one big difference: nobody in the current incarnation of those days of swine and poses seems to be having any fun. This is one party where the hangover begins almost as soon as the evening does.

Almost two and a half years after the Roundabout's canny cash cow of a revival of "Cabaret" closed at Studio 54 (after more than five years in residence), the company is again inviting theatergoers to come to the cabaret, old chum. This time the occasion is Scott Elliott's production of the 1928 show that made musicals like "Cabaret" and "Chicago" possible: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "Threepenny Opera" is the granddaddy of all the singing, stinging portraits of fat societies on their eves of destruction.

Mr. Elliott has even recruited one of the stars of the Roundabout "Cabaret," Alan Cumming, who won a Tony playing the ghoulish M.C. in the Kander-Ebb musical and who here portrays the murdering, whoring, stealing Macheath (Mac the Knife), the prince of thieves in stinking, corrupt London. But while it raises the kink quotient even higher than "Cabaret" did, this production has nothing like the same sustained point of view that might hook and hypnotize audiences. With Mr. Elliott overseeing a cast jam-packed with misused talent (including the pop stars Cyndi Lauper and Nellie McKay), this "Threepenny" takes Brecht's notion of the theater of alienation to new self-defeating extremes.

Created in the era in which "Cabaret" was set, "The Threepenny Opera" remains the most famous and popular example of what Brecht called "epic theater." Inspired by John Gay's rollicking "Beggar's Opera" (1728), "Threepenny" translated the tale of the villainous but irresistible Macheath and his marauders into the age of Queen Victoria. But the show's real satiric targets were the middle classes of poverty-crippled, rudderless Germany in the 1920's.

Using deliberately artificial techniques — painted signs, scene-setting titles, spoken asides and musical-hall songs that often had little to do with the immediate plot — the play was designed to sustain an intellectual distance, to allow audiences to see their own reflections in vicious thugs, whores, beggars and policemen motivated by the same primal needs and instincts as themselves. The music, Brecht wrote, was meant to become "an active collaborator in the stripping bare of the middle-class corpus of ideas."

An immediate, scandalous hit in Europe, "Threepenny" failed to generate the same frissons when it first arrived in New York in 1933. Writing of its Broadway premiere in The New York Times, Lewis Nichols described it as "a gently mad evening in the theater for those who like their spades in the usual nomenclature of the earnest." It wasn't until the fabled Off Broadway revival at the Theater de Lys in 1954 — with Weill's widow, Lotte Lenya, as the prostitute Jenny — that "Threepenny" achieved popular success in Manhattan.

That production used a translation by Marc Blitzstein that is probably still the best-known English version but is regarded by purists as a softened and sanitized interpretation. Certainly no such complaints can be lodged against the new translation by the playwright Wallace Shawn, whose rendering is both more densely lyrical (with some cumbersome poetic tropes in the songs) and explicitly obscene than any I know. This is a show that doesn't hesitate to call sexual organs and acts by their most common names, loudly and repeatedly.

In the same spirit Mr. Elliott has chosen to make full use of a freedom from censorship that Brecht could only have envied. So in this version Macheath's love interests include not only the usual component of female whores (most notably Ms. Lauper as Jenny), but also their male counterparts.

Macheath again finds himself torn between two brides: the demi-virginal Polly Peachum (Ms. McKay) and Lucy Brown (Brian Charles Rooney). But in this case Lucy is a man, who makes a point of showing the audience exactly what lies beneath his skirt. Macheath's friendship with Tiger Brown (Christopher Innvar), Lucy's father and the chief of police, is of the crotch-grabbing, kissing kind. And for a copulatory free-for-all brothel sequence, the participants' underwear glows luridly beneath a black light. (Jason Lyons did the lighting, which allows for Brechtian signage to be writ in neon and L.C.D. supertitles.)

Isaac Mizrahi created the costumes here, in a smorgasbord of salacious styles, from a cleavage-flashing Chanel-style suit to the "Blue Angel"-style chanteuse get-ups worn by Ms. Lauper. Most of the clothes, plucked from racks on Derek McLane's naked it's-only-a-play set, suggest that their wearers have just come from frolicking in the back room of a leather bar. This includes Mr. Cumming's Macheath, who trades in the character's usual gentlemanly suit and bowler for a punkish ensemble and a Mohawk.

The performances are just as widely varied and as bereft of character-defining purpose. Everything seems done for isolated shock effect, without any regard to how one stylistic component might relate to another, so it's impossible to intuit exactly what society is being skewered.

Looking like Dietrich and sounding like a Brooklyn Piaf, Ms. Lauper delivers Jenny's ballads with teary, soulful intensity. She also leads, in Lenya-like style, the show's famous prologue, "Song of the Extraordinary Crimes of Mac the Knife." That marvelous trouper Jim Dale plays Mr. Peachum, Polly's father and the head of a vast network of beggars, in the seedy music-hall style of Laurence Olivier in "The Entertainer." As his wife, Ana Gasteyer talks like a shrill Scarsdale matron and sings penetratingly in a voice of a hundred trumpets.

Mr. Cumming brings much conviction and agony to Macheath's songs of the oppressed in the prison and hanging scenes. But there's little sense of the menacing charisma that keeps all of London atremble.

Ms. McKay, the inventive and seriously talented young singer-songwriter ("Get Away From Me"), comes closest to achieving a Brechtian effect. Clad in trailing pre-Raphaelite bridal white, her Polly speaks and sings with a flat, deadpan sincerity that suggests sugary blandness can accommodate a multitude of sins. It's a brave, carefully thought-out performance, though its willful affectlessness means that songs like "Pirate Jenny" (restored to Polly here, as in the original version) have no chance of being showstoppers.

The only songs delivered at full throttle are those that tell the audience members how rotten they are: "Certain Things Make Our Life Impossible," "How Do Humans Live?," "Cry From the Grave." But in presenting Brecht's lowlifes as exotic, feckless party animals instead of as pseudo-bourgeois materialists, Mr. Elliott keeps these characters at more of a distance from us than Brecht surely ever intended. Their censoriousness registers as just a random dip in a pharmaceutically induced roller coaster of moods. Another line of cocaine or two, and these hedonists will forget all about the poor and hungry.

Costume Designs by Macy Perrone

Costume Designs for Rice University's The Threepenny Opera
by Macy Peronne
Assistant: Cait McMillen

Macheath (Charlie McKean)

Jenny Divers-Elissa Levitt

Polly Peachum- Laura Botkin

Mr. Peachum- Daniel Williamson;

Mrs. Peachum- Rachel Buchman

Mac's Gang
Ed- Mark Plitt; Wa:lt Dreary- Dustin Gallo; Jimmy- Catherine Augello; Matt of the Mint-Aaron Tallman; Crookfinger Jack- Patrick Kruse; Sawtooth Bob-Jordan Bunch

The Whores: Whore in white- Catherine Augello, Betty- Caroline Turner, Whore with beret- Victoria Solorzano, Dolly- MK Quinn



The Beggars (Chorus); Filch- William Figueroa

Louise Brooks in "Pandora's Box"

Click on the images to be brought to short videos!

Louise Brooks plays a whore in Pandora's Box.
Here are some video links for inspiration!

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• Clip from Pandora's Box
  

• Clips of Louise Brooks in the silent film "Pandora's Box" where she plays Lulu (to the tune of Mr. Brightside)

Artists of the Time- Marcel Slodki

Marcel Slodki (1892-1943)


Marcel Slodki's design for "Das Börsenlied" (lyrics: Walter Mehring, music: Friedrich Hollaender)

- as performed by Trude Hesterberg in her "Wilde Bühne," November 1921

http://www.ecoledeparis.org/artists/view/marcel_slodki

Slodki was born into a liberal, laic family. His father was a bank manager.

In 1910 Slodki moved to Munich to study at the Fine Art Academy.

In 1913 he moved to Paris and lived for one year in Rousseau’s former atelier.

Moving to Switzerland in 1914 he met Tristan Tzara, drew Dada posters for a cabaret entitled "La Scene" and illustrated several Tchekoff works. He also designed plans for an architect. These he used in later works. He returned to Poland and painted landscapes of Kazimierz and Kuzmir, then travelled to England and continued to paint in London. At the end of the First World War he worked in Berlin designing theatre sets.

In 1923 he returned to Paris and resumed painting. He destroyed all his former work inspired by cubism, which he later regretted.

In 1937 he returned to Poland for a solo exhibition. He painted portraits, city scenes and still life compositions. He married Macha Boulanger, a painter who signed her works “Mabull”. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Slodki left Poland to join his wife in Brives, resuming his painting and exhibiting his work in spite of the difficulties of war.

In 1943 the gendarmes came to arrest him, but he had been alerted by the Brives sous-prefet. He hid, received forged identity papers and fled with Mabull to Chambéry. They settled in Bourg-Saint-Maurice. On December 14, 1943, Mabull and Slodki were denounced and arrested by Gestapo agents.

They were interned in Drancy and deported on December 17, 1943 on convoy n° 63.

They were assassinated in Auschwitz.

Nadine Nieszawer, Marie Boyé, Paul Fogel
"Peintres Juifs à Paris 1905-1939 Ecole de Paris"
Editons Denoel 2000

Society and Crisis: The Wiemar Republic Class Syllabus

GERM 331 / ARTS 386

Professor Christian J. Emden
E-Mail: emden@rice.edu
Office: Rayzor Hall 326
Office Hours: Thu 2:30-3:30 Professor Christina Keefe
E-Mail: ck1@rice.edu
Office: Hamman Hall 103B
Office Hours:



SOCIETY AND CRISIS
POLITICAL CULTURE IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC


SUMMARY

Germany of the 1920s and early 1930s offers a dazzling look at the possibilities and limits of modernity. Born out of the experience of the First World War and a political revolution that overturned traditional forms of authority, the Weimar Republic delivered one of the most liberal constitutions ever written, produced some of the most striking images and films of modern culture, and turned urban life into a spectacle of consumerism, architecture, fashion, and money. Yet, the Weimar Republic is also a time of political and social crisis: inflation, the ever present spectre of revolution, and a constitutional crisis that ultimately led to the rise of Hitler. No other period shows the ambivalence of modernity as clearly as Weimar Germany.


REQUIREMENTS

You should prepare for each class by reading the set texts. Making notes in advance will help you to focus on the discussion and formulate questions during class.

You are also required to actively participate in discussions and write TWO essays on topics to be announced. You are encouraged to come to office hours if you have questions relating to any part of the course, or if you wish to discuss your essays before final submission.

The final grade consists of:
Regular attendance, careful preparation, participation in discussion: 20 %
Two essays (10 pages each, word processed, double spaced): 80 %

In order to pass the course, all requirements need to be fulfilled!

Any student with a disability needing adjustments or accommodations is encouraged to speak with the professor during the first two weeks of class. All discussions will remain confidential. Students with disabilities are also required to contact the Disability Support Services in the Ley Student Center.


SYLLABUS

Aug 25 Introduction

TOWARDS CIVIL SOCIETY

Aug 27 Germany, 1918/19: Democracy or Dictatorship (Lecture by Christian J. Emden)
Sept 1 Max Weber and the Political
• Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, ed. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2004), pp. 32-94.
Sept 3 Max Weber and the Political (cont.)
Sept 8 The Weimar Constitution
• http://www.zum.de/psm/weimar/weimar_vve.php/
• Richard Thoma, “The Reich as a Democracy,” in Arthur J. Jacobson and Bernhard Schlink (eds.), Weimar: A Jurisprudence of Crisis (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 157-70.
Sept 10 No Class (Christian J. Emden is in Oxford, England)
Sept 15 Research and Resources in the Humanities (Workshop)

THE SPECTACLE OF MODERNITY

Sept 17 Neue Sachlichkeit—Writing Weimar
• David Midgley, Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918-1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 14-56.
• Selections from Bertold Brecht, Kurt Tucholsky, etc.
Sept 22 Berlin Cabaret Songs
• Songs by Mischa Spoliansky, Friedrich Hollaender, Rudolf Nelson, and Berthold Goldschmidt.
Sept 24 Berlin Cabaret Songs (cont.)
Sept 29 Photographic Realities, Social Images (Talk by Paul Hester, Visual and Dramatics Arts)
• Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, vol. II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 507-30.
• Photographs by August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch, László Moholy-Nagy, etc.
Oct 1 Photography, Architecture, and the Order of Modernity (Talk by Paul Hester, Visual and Dramatics Arts)
Oct 6 Staging Bertold Brecht’s Three-Penny Opera (Presentation by Leslie Swackhamer)
Oct 8 No Class (Christian Emden is in Washington D.C.)
Oct 13 No Class (Mid-term Recess)
Oct 15 Film in Weimar Germany (Talk by Charles Dove, Visual and Dramatic Arts)
Oct 20 Fritz Lang, Metropolis, 1927 (Film Screening @ Rice Media Center)
Oct 22 The Politics of Cinema—Walter Benjamin
• Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, vol. III (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

MONEY, SEX, AND CLASS

Oct 27 Money and Modern Society (Lecture by Christian J. Emden)
Oct 30 The Salaried Masses
• Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1998).
Nov 3 The Economy of Desire
• Irmgard Keun, The Artificial Silk Girl, trans. Kathie von Ankum (New York: Other Press, 2002).
• Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 76-91.
Nov 5 Brecht’s Epic Theater and the Task of Social Criticism

CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

Nov 10 Hans Kelsen and the Value of Democracy
• Hans Kelsen, “On the Essence and Value of Democracry,” and Richard Thoma, “The Reich as Democracy,” in Arthur J. Jacobson and Bernhard Schlink (eds.), Weimar: A Jurisprudence of Crisis (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 84-109 and 157-70.
Nov 12 Carl Schmitt and the State of Exception
• Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 5-52.
Nov 13 Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill, Three-Penny Opera, 1928 (Opening Night @ Hamman Hall)
Nov 17 Constitutional Endgames—Carl Schmitt in 1932
• Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy, trans. Jeffrey Seitzer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
Nov 19 Constitutional Endgames (cont.)
Nov 24 Politics as Myth
• Ernst Forsthoff, “The Total State,” and Reinhard Höhn, “Legal Community as National Community,” both in Arthur J. Jacobson and Bernhard Schlink (eds.), Weimar: A Jurisprudence of Crisis (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 320-23
Nov 26 NO CLASS (Thanksgiving Recess)
Dec 1 Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will, 1935 (Film Screening @ Rice Media Center)
Dec 3 Final Discussion



Required Reading for Purchase

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume III, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)
Arthur J. Jacobson and Bernhard Schlink (eds.), Weimar: A Jurisprudence of Crisis (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000)
Irmgard Keun, The Artificial Silk Girl, trans. Kathie von Ankum (New York: Other Press, 2002)
Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1998)
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, foreword Tracy B. Strong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)
Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy, trans. Jeffrey Seitzer, introd. John P. McCormick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)
Janet Ward, Weimar Sufaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920 Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001)
Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures, ed. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2004)


Recommended Reading for Purchase

Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947) (newer edition available)
Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (London: Allen Lane, 1991)

Costuming Inspiration

The Tiger Lillies- their style, makeup, attitude.





The Whores
gangsters

Photographic Research

"For some years now the glory of our age has been a machine which daily amazes the mind and startles the eye. Before another century is out, this machine will be the brush, the palette, the colors, the craft, the experience, the patience, the dexterity, the sureness of touch, the atmosphere, the luster, the exemplar, the perfection, the very essence of painting... Le no one suppose that daguerreo-type photography will be the death of art... When the daguerreotype that infant producy, has grown to its full stature, when all its an [sp?] and strength have been revealed, then will Geniu seize it by the scruff of the neck adn shout: "Come with me- you are mine now! We shall work together!" - Antoine Wiertz 1855 in a sort of "sulute" to photography (taken from Little History of Photography [walter benjamin]

Visual Research

Visual Inspiration and Research- Otto Dix

Otto Dix (1891-1969), the great German Expressionist, was famous for his unique and grotesque style. Although Hitler's Nazi regime destroyed many of Otto Dix's works, the majority of his paintings can still be seen in museums throughout Germany.

http://www.mess.net/galleria/dix/