should be held at an emotional distance from the action, able
to evaluate what is before them.^23 Indeed, one of Brecht’s aims
was to repudiate the Wagnerian aesthetic and recognize forms
of drama that broke open the assumption of unity as the aim of
the action. “When the epic theatre’s methods begin to pene-
trate the opera, the first result is a radical separation of the
elements,” Brecht wrote. “The great struggle for supremacy be-
tween words, music, and production...can simply be bypassed
by radically separating the elements.” This “radical separation
of the elements” had long been built into the revue formats de-
scribed in this chapter, which had great attraction for Brecht.
When he saw Oklahoma!on Broadway in 1946, he praised its
plot as providing “scaffolding” for the “inserts” of the num-
bers, which is a better metaphor than a seamless whole, and
when his version of The Duchess of Malfifailed in New York, he
complained that the cast lacked the technique of the American
musical. Zero Mostel and Elsa Lancaster, both trained in vaude-
ville theatre, were approached by Brecht for leads in his plays.
To be sure, he also called the musical an empty form of drama
for its political vacuity, but he knew that the song-and-dance
format of the musical and the revue was one American source
of technique for what he termed Epic Theatre.^24
The musical is imbued with the capitalistic economic system
that Brecht despised. In one of his earliest theoretical state-
ments, appended to his and Kurt Weill’s opera The Rise and Fall
of the City of Mahagonny, Brecht noted that the capitalist appa-
ratus of opera made fodder of the intellectuals who wrote the
libretti and the music. The writers think they are producing
the artwork, Brecht said, but in fact they are caught up in a sys-
tem that is controlled by financial interests and is devoted to
reproducing the successful formats of the past. The financial
26 CHAPTER ONE
(^23) The idea is frequent in Brecht but is succinct in “On Music in Drama,” in
Willett, ed., Brecht on Theatre.
(^24) Brecht saw Oklahoma!on September 30, 1946, accompanied by Ferdi-
nand Reyher, whose diary is the source of information. See Lyon, Bertolt Brecht
in America, 148–49. A dancer featured in Oklahoma!, Joan McCracken, later
played Galileo’s daughter in the New York production of Charles Laughton’s
Galileo, although Brecht may have had no hand in this bit of casting.