I always thought there was something half-baked in Bertolt Brecht’s formulation of the “alienation effect.” First, there is a discrepancy between what he aims for and the method he proposes to get ...

The haunting strains of Kurt Weill’s music for The Threepenny Opera are an indelible part of American popular culture — and, for those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 60s, so are Marc Blitzstein’s ...