Buried within Heinrich Breloer’s superficial and plodding two-part TV movie about Bertolt Brecht are old and new interviews with the playwright’s collaborators that hold a fascination light years away from the fictionalized elements clunkily re-created for the cameras. For the most part, “Brecht” is exactly the kind of “prestige” biopic one expects from public television, where acting is often arch, dialogue is impossibly dense, and historic personalities have the depth of a mint wafer. Yet extracts from a recent interview with actress Regine Lutz, her eyes lighting up with unfathomably rich memories, convey Brecht’s charisma and impact in ways Breloer’s script can’t get anywhere near. Broadcast will be limited to German-speaking screens.
The movie neatly divides into two roughly 90-minute episodes (screened together at the Berlinale with a brief intermission in-between) and go from his early years up to his death in East Berlin in...
The movie neatly divides into two roughly 90-minute episodes (screened together at the Berlinale with a brief intermission in-between) and go from his early years up to his death in East Berlin in...
- 2/9/2019
- by Jay Weissberg
- Variety Film + TV
This month finds me settling into rehearsals for Sara Farrington's "Untitled Play About Brecht & His Girlfriends & Boyfriend & Wife." I play one of the girlfriends, Bess, aka Elisabeth Hauptmann, a German writer who collaborated with Bertolt Brecht. I'm convinced I must be in some kind of actor heaven right now. The script is gorgeous and thrilling, I'm working with some of the most playful and present actors I've ever had the pleasure of encountering, and we have two extremely talented artists at the helm. Sara, our playwright and director, works with the actors very closely and generously builds our contributions into the show, constantly rewriting and fine-tuning as we go, while Katie Rose McLauglhin, our movement designer, makes sure our every gesture counts. The result of this kind of collaboration is a production filled with performers -- there are a whopping 12 of us in this one --...
- 5/26/2012
- by help@backstage.com (Erin Mallon)
- backstage.com
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By Herbert Shadrak
Let’s face it. Many Hollywood biographies are cut-and-paste jobs, recycling (if not actually cribbing) material from other sources – yellowing issues of Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, vintage tabloids or previously published biographies – and retelling the same old anecdotes. Happily, The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre is no such hack job. It is one of the finest biographies of an actor ever written, on a par with Patricia Bosworth’s Montgomery Clift and Charles Winecoff’s Split Image: The Life of Anthony Perkins. However, the time it took to research and write the Lorre tome may well be unprecedented. Author Stephen D. Youngkin started working on The Lost One in the early 1970s and the book was finally published in 2005, so there are many first-hand accounts by Lorre’s friends and colleagues (most of whom have died over...
By Herbert Shadrak
Let’s face it. Many Hollywood biographies are cut-and-paste jobs, recycling (if not actually cribbing) material from other sources – yellowing issues of Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, vintage tabloids or previously published biographies – and retelling the same old anecdotes. Happily, The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre is no such hack job. It is one of the finest biographies of an actor ever written, on a par with Patricia Bosworth’s Montgomery Clift and Charles Winecoff’s Split Image: The Life of Anthony Perkins. However, the time it took to research and write the Lorre tome may well be unprecedented. Author Stephen D. Youngkin started working on The Lost One in the early 1970s and the book was finally published in 2005, so there are many first-hand accounts by Lorre’s friends and colleagues (most of whom have died over...
- 4/5/2009
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
Columbia Stages presents The Threepenny Opera, a play with music after John Gay?s The Beggar?s Opera, in Three Acts, music by Kurt Weill, German translation by Elisabeth Hauptmann, adaptation and lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, English translation by Michael Feingold, and directed by Henning A. Hegland, running April 1st - 4th, 2009, at The Riverside Theatre, located in the historic Riverside Church at 91 Claremont Avenue between 120th and 122nd Streets.
- 3/22/2009
- BroadwayWorld.com
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