The New York Times recently published a piece looking back at a fascinating chapter in the history of Broadway musicals. Three giants of music and dance - Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins - came together in 1967 to develop a new musical that would match their greatest triumph ten years earlier - West Side Story. While Shakespeare inspired West Side Story, Jerome Robbins turned to Bertolt Brecht for this new project. At first glance this doesn't seem strange, since Three Penny Opera had already enjoyed a long run Off-Broadway and Bernstein had been involved in that early success. So Brecht was already well-known to the New York theater crowd. But for this new project Robbins chose the most radical of all of Brecht's Lehrstücke ("Didactic Plays") - Die Maβnahme ("The Measures Taken") which itself had been inspired by Lenin's pamphlet Radical "Communism" , An Infantile Disorder. In the play, a group of revolutionary agitators in China are forced to kill one of their own - Der junge Genosse (The Young Comrade) - after his extremist behavior threatens their mission. Later the agitators ask the Party - here Der Kontrollchor - for retroactive approval of their actions. The play ends with a Lob der Partei ("In Praise of the Party"):
Der Einzelne kann vernichtet werden / Aber die Partei kann nicht vernichtet werden / Denn sie ist der Vortrupp der Massen / und führ ihrn Kampf / Mit den Methoden der Klassiker, welche geschöpft since / Aus der Kenntnis der Wirklichkeit.
Actually it was The Measures Taken that caught the attention of the House of Un-American Activities in 1947, which summoned Brecht to a public hearing in 1947. When asked directly about the "communist propaganda" in the play, Brecht cleverly deflected by insisting it had been mistranslated (you can watch the amusing interrogation of Brecht by the HUAC here.
Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein eventually decided that The Measures Taken perhaps wasn't the best vehicle for the new musical, and instead chose the Brecht's next Lehrstück - Die Ausnahme und die Regel ("The Exception and the Rule") - a Marxist parable of capitalistic exploitation and injustice.
“The Exception and the Rule,” is about a rapacious oil merchant (read: capitalism) who races another merchant across a desert to win a lucrative deal. Accompanying him are a guide and a porter; when the three get lost, and the porter (read: exploited labor) tries to help the merchant, the merchant misunderstands the gesture and shoots him. Naturally, being of the ruling class, he is acquitted: Self-defense, the judge decides, applies even if the threat is imaginary."
Sondheim agreed to move ahead with the lyrics for the musical, although he had some reservations concerning Brecht:
"Sondheim, eager to work with Robbins, whom he called “the only genius I had ever associated with,” thought this story might work, even though he found most of Brecht, and especially the teaching plays, “insufferably simplistic.” In his book “Look, I Made a Hat,” he wrote that there was “too much Lehr in each stück” — too much teaching in each play — “to hold my attention.”
Eventually the three geniuses - Bernstein, Sondheim, and Robbins - had a falling out and bailed on the project. What ultimately killed it was the world's worst show title - chosen by Bernstein: A Pray by Blecht.
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