Bertolt Brecht

Christopher Hitchens has published an essay on Osama bin Ladne, "The Enemy." with Amazon as a Kindle Single....

Call me cynical but one of my favorite books last year was a sobering tome by Barbara Ehrenreich called, Bright-Sided, How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Our nation's obsession with positive thinking practically...

Before Hans Zimmer even began work on Guy Ritchie’s take on “Sherlock Holmes,” the film was loaded with Zimmer music. As he was about to embark on the seven-month project that would be composing and conducting the score for the......

THEATER REVIEW: "Baal" ★★★Through June 20 by TUTA at Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division St.; Running time: 2 hours; Tickets: $25 at 773-680-0826 or tutato.com The very early plays of a very young Bertolt Brecht have proved to be quite......

The pulse of the tango insinuates itself into a Chinese opera. A British comedy erupts in the midst of a bunraku performance. Guatemalan cloth brushes up against Oriental silk.These are but a few of the cultural mash-ups on view in......

Will the truth triumph over superstition and dogma? That was the question hovering in a Tehran theater Sunday afternoon as 14 men and women in black clothes circled around the astronomer Galileo Galilei in director Dariush Farhang's sometimes nightmarish,...

From San Francisco The happiest surprise of British director John Doyle’s dashing, apocalyptic staging of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” which opened Wednesday at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, is the depth of...

--Bidding farewell: John L. Gray, president of the Autry National Center of the American West, will announce his retirement today. (Los Angeles Times) --Scientific treasure: The original 46-page manuscript of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity...

THEATER REVIEW: "Trust" ★★★½ Through April 25 at the Lookingglass Theatre in Water Tower Works, 821 N. Michigan Ave.; Running Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes; Tickets: $18-62 at 312-337-0665 and lookingglasstheatre.org There is little in the way of safe...

Hanns Eisler is not, yet, a recovered voice. A two-time Oscar nominee for best score, the German composer, who fled the Nazis in 1933, was the first in motion pictures to be called up by the House Committee on Un-American......

THEATER REVIEW: "Billy Elliot the Musical" ★★★★ Extended run at the Oriental Theatre, 24 W. Randolph St.; Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes; Tickets: $30-$100 at 800-775-2000 and www.broadwayinchicago.com • When Elton met Billy (posted March 13,...

Like many opera illiterates, I used to associate Richard Wagner’s “Gotterdammerung” with one thing: Nazis. Those ominous strings, the rumbling timpani, the heroic heralding horns; they could mean only one thing ... more Hitler footage on t...