In Look, I Made a Hat, the second volume of his collected lyrics, Stephen Sondheim recalls working with Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, and John Guare on a musical based on one of Brecht’s Lehrstücke — literally, “teaching works.” Their adaptation, called by Bernstein A Pray by Blecht, was abandoned in 1968; one problem was Sondheim’s “Brechtophobia.” He had previously turned down an offer to write English lyrics for the Brecht-Weill Mahagonny because of what he calls its “ham-handed satirical comment,” and the more he read Brecht’s plays, the less he liked them. “I found the stagecraft intriguing, and sometimes the stories as well,” he writes, “but the cartoonish characters and polemic dialogue were, for me, insufferably simplistic. They had to be that way, of course, for Brecht’s purposes, but I was simply not one of his targeted audience and there was just too much Lehr in each...
- 10/30/2013
- by Jesse Green
- Vulture
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