This is not intended to be a truly all-encompassing post. My thoughts on Brecht are not particularly profound. But I wanted to pull together a few disparate threads on Bertold Brecht. I did manage to see Three Penny Opera on Sat. over at Video Cabaret. This was actually a student production from UT Mississauga, and they decided it was worth bringing the whole show/ensemble for a short run in Toronto. This review seems fair. It is definitely quite a bit updated from the original. Now I had seen Three Penny Opera in Ann Arbor way back in the day (probably 1988 or 1989!), but I didn't really remember much of it. And while I remembered the entire thing was pretty sordid, I had somehow thought that after Jenny grasses on MacHeath that she is murdered (which would make a lot of sense), and I totally forgot the weird, artificial ending where MacHeath is pardoned at the very end. (I have to wonder if Brecht was nodding towards the ending of Tartuffe, which I find so objectionable; it sort of works better here, as Brecht was usually one to point out the artificiality of theatre.) Even though the singing wasn't amazing, it was definitely an interesting night out, and I'm glad I saw it.
As it happens, I was sitting next to a mature student who had absolutely fallen in love with this show, and had seen it six times in Mississauga and six times in Toronto. Wow. Talk about obsessive. I have certainly seen the same show in different stagings. Though sometimes I really don't want an inferior staging to mess with an iconic version, which happened to me with a fairly blah version of Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine out at UBC (somewhat threatening to overwrite in my mind a fascinating production from UM in the late 80s). It's one reason I don't think I will ever go see another version of Letts' August: Osage County, and even moreso with Spamalot where I saw Tim Curry, David Hyde Pierce and Hank Azaria! But I don't think I've doubled up on the same production, with one exception of The Trojan Girls & The Outhouse of Atreus over at Factory, where you saw half indoors and half outdoors, and I wanted to see if switching the order of the inside and outside acts made a difference. Also, I guess I have seen a couple of musicals twice where the touring version wasn't substantially different (Crazy for You and Come From Away). But it is still very, very rare for me to think I need to see the same production of a play or musical twice.* At any rate, I was babbling on about the tragic nature of Three Penny Opera to this student, who must have known that really nothing particularly tragic happens (on stage at least) in this production, but he didn't bother to correct me.
I'll see if I can track down the various programs to prove which Brecht plays I have seen. I've seen almost all his major works (or at least the ones I care about) with one exception - The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. I missed a fairly solid production in Chicago (I can't remember if I had been living away from Chicago or just returned and hadn't plugged back into the theatre scene, but, either way, annoying). Then apparently there was a production in Toronto in 2013, right before I returned to Toronto. (The list of things I just missed out on in Toronto in 2012 or 2013 is quite long and frustrating - Angels in America at Soulpepper, Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests, Lobby Hero (in what was probably a better production than the one I finally saw in Hamilton), Shanley's Savage in Limbo and a couple of others that escape me at the moment. Interestingly, there was a 2 day workshop production of this at Canadian Stage in 2022 (that I completely missed!). I do think after I finally manage to catch this, this will be the last Brecht that I actively seek out, but if some of the big ones crop up again, I will definitely go.
When I was at University of Michigan, there was a company called the RC (Residential College) Brecht Company, which is sadly now defunct. I saw them do Drums in the Night and Three Penny Opera, as well as The Breadshop and the Brecht-adjacent Devil's Disciple by G.B. Shaw. It sounds like they were losing steam by 1989 in terms of their big productions, though there were a few one-off productions that followed until 1993 or so, which sounded like they were quite interesting, and I would have enjoyed them had I still been in town. At any rate, I was introduced to Brecht fairly early in my theatre-going "career."
Baal
Drums in the Night (Ann Arbor, 1988)
The Breadshop (Ann Arbor, 1990?)
In the Jungle of Cities (Chicago)
Three Penny Opera (Ann Arbor, 1989 & Toronto, 2025)
Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (Toronto, 2018)
Life of Galileo (Chicago, 2016**)
Mother Courage and Her Children (Cambridge, UK, 2006)
Good Person of Szechwan (NYC, 1994 & Chicago, 2007)
Caucasian Chalk Circle (Chicago, 2011 & Toronto, 2018)
The Wedding (Chicago, 2011)
I know for certain I saw In the Jungle of Cities in Chicago, even though I can't dig up my theatre program. I'm less sure about Baal. There was a production at Trap Door in 2000, right before I left Chicago, and I would likely have seen that. There was also one in 2009, though this was in Pilsen, and I didn't get to that part of Chicago often, so I don't think I went then. Very curiously, Tuta Theatre (in Chicago) also did Baal in 2010. I saw a few of their productions, including The Wedding, so it seems fairly likely I would have gone to their Baal, but the photos are not stirring up any memories, whereas the photos from The Wedding are bringing back memories of the show -- and I even found my scanned program from The Wedding, so that settles the matter. Maybe I have not seen Baal after all, though that seems a seems a bit unlikely frankly.
Anyway, I have seen quite a lot of Brecht, all things considered, though not many (any?) of his shorter one-act plays. Aside from Arturo Ui, I would probably most like to see another production of Mother Courage and perhaps his version of Antigone. Sadly there was a very good production of Mother Courage at Trap Door in Jan. 2024 (when I was still willing to travel to Chicago for pleasure), but I didn't go.
* That said, I would probably see Something Rotten! again if the Mirvish picked up the production that was at Stratford last year, though it doesn't appear they are doing so. I am toying with the idea of seeing Some Like It Hot at Mirvish in 2026, though I don't know if any of the cast would be carried over from the Broadway version and indeed what other changes might be made for the touring production. And perhaps the next time The Book of Mormon swings through Toronto, I'll see that again. I remember when that was such the hot ticket.
** I actually made a special theatre trip to Chicago, where I saw this production by Remy Bumppo and Annie Baker's The Flick at Steppenwolf. While theatre in Toronto is at a good level, it just does not compare to the quality and breadth of what was (and surely still is) available in Chicago. Sigh.
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