OUR Program

song List

Part 1 Love and Agitation
Alabama Song (Weill, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogonny, 1930)
Mack the Knife (Weill, Threepenny Opera, 1928)
Tango ballade (Weill, Threepenny Opera, 1928)
Nothing Quite Like Money  (Eisler, Roundheads and Pointheads, 1936)
Nanna’s Lied  (Weill, 1939)

Part II The War Years
From Brecht’s unread testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (1947)
Ballade of Marie Sanders (Eisler, The Private Life of the Master Race, 1938)
The Jewish Wife I (The Private Life of the Master Race, 1938)
On Suicide (Eisler, The Good Person of Szechuan, 1943)
The Jewish Wife II (The Private Life of the Master Race, 1938)
Abortion is Illegal (Eisler, 1929)
The German Mother (Eisler, The Private Life of the Master Race, 1938)
A German at Stalingrad (Eisler, The Private Life of the Master Race, 1938)

Part III Exile
From Brecht’s unread testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (1947)
From the Hollywood Elegies (1941-1947)
Song of Sexual Dependency (Weill, Threepenny Opera, 1928)
From Brecht’s testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (1947)
Song of the Big Shot (Weill, Happy End, 1929)

Part IV Bilbao
Salomon Song ((Weill, Threepenny Opera, 1928)
Denn Wie Mann Sich Bettet (Weill, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogonny, 1930)
Pirate Jenny ((Weill, Threepenny Opera, 1928)
Song of Mandalay (Weill, Happy End, 1929)
Surabaya Johnny (Weill, Happy End, 1929)
Bilbao Song (Weill, Happy End, 1929)
Song of Alabama (Reprise)

Translations by: Eric Bentley, Marc Blitzstein, Michael Feingold, Ralph Manheim, George Tabori and John Willett

A Note on the Performance

Belle Linda Halpern, Ron Roy, and Pilgrim Theatre’s Kermit Dunkelberg and Kim Mancuso first created Moon Over Dark Street, our original compilation of songs and texts by the revolutionary German playwright Bertolt Brecht, in 1998 (premiere, Boston Center for the Arts). We were drawn to the directness of these songs: their dramatic and melodic economy and force, as well as the resonance we felt to our own social and political experience. Returning to this material twenty years later (after an invitation to perform at The Gloucester Stage Company), it has been both inspiring and dismaying to recognize the persistent relevance of these songs and texts. Inspiring because the dramatic and compositional techniques pioneered by Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Lotte Lenya, and their many other collaborators continue to inspire artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Nick Cave, Teresa Stratis, The Dresden Dolls, Uta Lemper, Jean-Luc Godard, and the creators of the Netlix series Babylon Berlin. And us. Dismaying because of the parallels between the era of Brecht and his collaborators and our own time.

“Change the world: it needs it!” wrote Brecht and Eisler (in a song not included in Moon Over Dark Street). The songs do not just depict reality: they are meant to demonstrate that “reality” can be changed. And yet, the persistence of racism, sexism, oppression, and violence in our own time show that the vigilance and resistance exemplified in the work of Brecht and his collaborators is still a vital source of provocation and motivation.

For us, performing these songs, there are echoes of Charlottesville; #Me, Too; families divided by immigration policies; and the perpetual (yet, as Brecht wrote in the title of one of his plays, Resistable)[1] rise of “Big Shots.” We leave it to you, the audience, to form your own associations between these songs of 90 years ago and our own time.

The performance is divided thematically into four sections. The singers are not “characters,” but adopt various characters throughout.

The first section, “Love and Agitation,” depicts the heady, pleasure-seeking, morally ambivalent world of the Weimar Republic. Many audience members will know “Alabama Song” from a cover by “The Doors,” and “Mack the Knife” from a sanitized pop version by Bobby Darin. The bite of these songs has been somewhat diminished by over-familiarity. Yet Brecht, Hauptmann, Weill and Eisler intended to use the “entertainment value” of these melodies to cause the audience to question the foundations of their social and political word. (Brecht and his collaborators were not puritanical, nor did they reject the pleasure principle).

Part II, “The War Years”, reflects a change of only a couple of years, when Brecht and Eisler’s work became more overtly oppositional to the increasingly brazen outrages of the rising “Master Race.” The song “Abortion is Illegal” has been called the first anti-abortion song. “The Jewish Wife” and “The Ballad of Marie Sanders” expose the mechanisms of anti-Semitism. The section closes with two jarringly empathetic portraits: of the complicit mother of a Nazi soldier, and perhaps that same soldier facing death in a foreign wasteland, both experiencing a dawning insight of how they have been duped.

Like many German writers and intellectuals of the time, Brecht fled Nazi Germany to settle in the seemingly unlikely refuge of Hollywood.  All-too-briefly, he trained his critical eye on his place of exile, but he left the United States (a country he had expected to find to be a land of freedom) quickly, after being called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947. Brecht’s testimony has been lauded for its canniness, yet in the excerpts from depicted in Moon Over Dark Street, one can also detect his fear, and his disappointment. Although not previously a member of the Communist Party (despite numerous pro-Communist works), a year after leaving Hollywood Brecht settled in Communist East Berlin (where he maintained both an Austrian and an East German passport, enabling him to leave at any time). There, with Helene Weigel, he founded the Berliner Ensemble, whose influence continues to be felt today in world theatre and other art forms. Leaving the US, Brecht probably had similar feelings to those expressed by his fellow double-exile Hanns Eisler:

I leave this country not without bitterness and infuriation. I could well understand it when in 1933 the Hitler bandits put a price on my head and drove me out. They were the evil of the period; I was proud at being driven out. But I feel heartbroken over being driven out of this beautiful country in this ridiculous way.

Part IV, “Bilbao” is a return to the world of Part I, perhaps through a whiskey-soaked misplaced nostalgia. If the singers of these songs, who have adopted various characters throughout the performance, are characters themselves, then they are now more cynical: but are they wiser? Brecht’s writing rarely provides answers. Facing a complex world, the master dramatist Brecht, and his composer collaborators Weill and Eisler, sought a complex form of writing, which embraced contradiction. His work provokes questions. It advocates critical questioning as a stance toward one’s own historical moment, and experience of art and life.

[1] Brechts’ 1941 play The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui is a “parable” of the rise of Hitler, depicted as an Al Capone-style gangster.