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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Hitler's "Whiff Of Champagne": Curt Goetz And Celebrity In The Third Reich, William Grange
Hitler's "Whiff Of Champagne": Curt Goetz And Celebrity In The Third Reich, William Grange
William Grange
Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers' Party were obsessed with keeping the German theatre tradition vital and maintaining Berlin as a "cultural metropolis" after Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933. Upholding a dynamic and energetic cultural life for the nation was a task for which National Socialism, as a political movement embodying the "will of the people," felt itself eminently well qualified. The Nazis, therefore, began almost as soon as they took over the reins of government in Germany to support theatre as an art form and theatres as institutions to an extent unprecedented in …
The Theatrical Concession System In Prussia, 1811-1869, William Grange
The Theatrical Concession System In Prussia, 1811-1869, William Grange
William Grange
In 1869, the Prussian House of Deputies passed a law that transformed theatre practice in Berlin and other Prussian cities. When the newly unified Germany came into being two years later, the 1869 law became the legal order of business for all theatres within the new Reich. That law, called the Gewerbefreiheit Gesetz (Freedom to Engage in Business Act), put an end to the way theatre had formerly been produced, dissolving the concession system that had been in operation for decades previous; it also terminated a tradition that had functioned for centuries, both in Prussia and in nearly all other …
Shakespeare In The Weimar Republic, William Grange
Shakespeare In The Weimar Republic, William Grange
William Grange
The Weimar Republic occupies a period in German history that has long fascinated students of theatre and drama. It was a period of profound change in German social, political, and cultural experience, and rarely has the confluence of those experiences figured so influentially upon the performance of William Shakespeare's plays. In decades previous to Weimar, German Shakespeare productions manifested the awed reverence in which the playwright was held, since most German actors, directors, and designers regarded Shakespeare in the same light as they did Goethe and Schiller. In 1864, for example, Germany celebrated the three-hundredth anniversary of the playwright's birth …
Channing Pollock: The American Theatre's Forgotten Polemicist, William Grange
Channing Pollock: The American Theatre's Forgotten Polemicist, William Grange
William Grange
Channing Pollock (1880-1946) is an obscure figure in the American theatre, whose well-structured plays reflected the quixotic idealism of their creator, his firm belief in traditional values, and his sense of moral urgency. His obscurity is unwarranted, for he was the foremost theatrical polemicist of his day, and the quality of his work far surpasses that of other, more well known polemicists such as John Howard Lawson or George Sklar. Moreoever, he was associated in the performance of his plays with some of the most talented and noteworthy production personnel the theatre in New York City has ever seen.
Theodor Lebrun And Industrial Comedy Space In Nineteenth Century Berlin, William Grange
Theodor Lebrun And Industrial Comedy Space In Nineteenth Century Berlin, William Grange
William Grange
The formation of the German Reich in 1871 was an occasion of unprecedented economic growth, accompanied by an equally conspicuous increase of both theatre construction and audience growth. One important aesthetic result, to paraphrase Hélène Cixous by way of Jacques Lacan, was "re-locating and un-making" the comic self in an alternative space of the Wilhelminian “Imaginary.” The victorious conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the collection of billions in war reparations from the vanquished French allowed the German economy between 1871 and 1890 to surpass that of France and soon thereafter that of Great Britain. The erstwhile Prussian …
"Tweaked Roman" In The Menaechmus Twins By Plautus, William Grange
"Tweaked Roman" In The Menaechmus Twins By Plautus, William Grange
William Grange
Why do a production of The Menaechmus Twins by Plautus at Marquette University in Milwaukee? Most people think of Milwaukee as the city of Laverne and Shirley, where a large percentage of the population is employed in one of numerous breweries, and citizens spend their non-working hours in bowling alleys or at fish fries. True, Milwaukee boasts more bowling alleys per capita than any other city in the country, but Milwaukee has more Equity theatres than breweries, one of which is an outstanding LORT A repertory theatre with an international reputation. The University itself features a major in classics, and …
Choices Of Evil: Brecht's Modernism In The Work With Eisler And Dessau, William Grange
Choices Of Evil: Brecht's Modernism In The Work With Eisler And Dessau, William Grange
William Grange
Brecht wanted composers of music for his mature work who were capable of creating an idiom complementary to his own modernist ideas of theatrical performance. That idiom he called "gestic" music, the kind capable of "conveying particular attitudes adopted by the speaker towards other men" [bestimmte Haltungen des Sprechenden anzeigt, die dieser anderen Menschen gegenüber einnimmt]. When playing a fascist, for example, the actor was not merely to present the character's pompousness; he or she was to illustrate a political stance toward that pompousness. Nor was the actor to reveal layers of the character's motivation, like girls in Broadway burlesque …
Heinz Hilpert: The Revitalization Of German Theatre After World War Ii, William Grange
Heinz Hilpert: The Revitalization Of German Theatre After World War Ii, William Grange
William Grange
When Heinz Hilpert died in Gottingen on 25 November 1967 at the age of seventy-seven, obituary notices throughout the German-speaking world hailed him as the last of the great theatre directors, a group that had included Otto Brahm, Max Reinhardt, Leopold Jessner, Jurgen Fehling, Erich Engel, and Gustaf Griindgens. As early as 1931, numerous critics considered him perhaps the best director in Berlin, second only to Reinhardt himself. Hilpert had indeed succeeded Reinhardt as Intendant of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 1933; when he did so he pledged himself to the task of preserving the Deutsches Theater as an …
Foreign-Language Comedy Production In The Third Reich, William Grange
Foreign-Language Comedy Production In The Third Reich, William Grange
William Grange
The two most frequently performed non-German comic playwrights on German-language stages from 1933 to 1944 were Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), whose plays served the purposes of cultural transmission both by the theatre establishment and the political regime in power at the time. Goethe had seen Goldoni productions in Venice during his "Italian Journeys" between 1786 and 1788, and he reported that never in his life had he heard such "laughter and bellowing at a theatre." It remains unclear whether he meant laughing and bellowing on the part of audiences or the actors, but since his other remarks …