Have Yourself a Very Weimar Weinachten

Am I the only one that caught the airing of the Rise and Fall of Mahagonny last night? Having long given up on any innovation coming from PBS, I do give a tip of the fedora to them for airing it at the peak of the gooey holiday specials. It was no surprise that Audra McDonald was brilliant and brought heart to a cartoon role, but at times she reminded me of Condi Rice -- a woman who whores herself to an evil empire in order to feed herself.=. Brecht's epic theater seems increasingly shrill and arch with the passage of time, but who can fault this production for melding together references to the Third Reich and Las Vegas. Mahagonny has long been a metaphor for many American boomtowns -- LA itself, Houston, Silicon Valley -- and echoes Kafka's Amerika.

This was a perfect finale to a year that brought us superb reissues of both Berlin Alexanderplatz and Threepenny Opera. I am humming Mortitat as I write this. "Violated...in her slumbers/Mackie, how much did you charge?"