What Antonin Artaud has described as a “strange sun”—a light of abnormal intensity that illuminates everything in the theater—can be cruel and merciless. Onstage, there’s nowhere to hide. The stage will always find you out.

Three Days of Rain is not only Ms. Roberts’ Broadway debut. According to the Playbill, it’s her first appearance on the professional stage. For myself, movie stars are one thing—one lucky thing, mostly. It takes an innate talent that’s been kissed by God to make it in the theater.

Ms. Roberts seems, firstly, not to have trained in the field. She lacks the necessary vocal equipment and emotional range. Yet she plays two roles: in the first act, set in 1995, the sensible sister, Nan; in the second act, which takes place in 1960, Nan’s madcap mother Lina, who’s an alcoholic Southerner compared to Zelda Fitzgerald. That might be a virtuoso stretch for the most gifted of actresses.

But Ms. Roberts practically reverses the two roles she’s supposed to play. She suggests neurotic tension in her peculiarly stiff, ill-at-ease performance as the calm, coping Nan, and there’s not even a hint of madness—least of all of a drunk, lost Zelda—in her dull, “adorable” Lina. Her delivery is flat at the best of times, nor can she sustain a Southern accent. Fatally for a stage actress, she possesses no danger, no inner life.

Let be. Mr. Greenberg’s sketchy, minor drama about family secrets, architecture and the creative impulse is a rambling form of theatrical blogging with a dash of gimmicky, faux mystery thrown in. The limited run is a sell-out. Also appearing with Julia Roberts are Paul Rudd and TV star Bradley Cooper. Mr. Rudd overacts in the first act, and Mr. Cooper overacts in both. Santo Loquasto’s costume designs manage to make Ms. Roberts look drab. Three Days of Rain is rumored to have been directed by Joe Mantello.

Penny-Farthing Opera

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter much that an opportunistic, star-driven Broadway show like Three Days of Rain gets produced and succeeds at the box office. It’s normal. What matters—and hurts terribly—is the fiasco the Roundabout Theatre Company has made of Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 The Threepenny Opera. It’s nothing that I, for one, can remain cool about. The sheer mindlessness of it all left me staggered and in despair. They’ve dropped a cluster-bomb on a masterpiece.

I was accompanied to the performance by Eric Bentley, the man who was most responsible for bringing Brecht’s great plays to America, and whose fine books and essays about the playwright are considered seminal. Let us assume that Mr. Bentley, who translated the lyrics of Kurt Weill’s enduring songs for a production of The Threepenny Opera in the 30’s, has no ax to grind. At 90, alert and still passionate about the theater, he’s done all the ax-grinding he cares to. The sensible Mr. Bentley threw in the towel at the end of the first act.

“No tragedy ever made me suffer so much,” he explained, and headed home.

When he asked me why I was staying for the second act, I replied lamely, “Duty.” But the die was cast in the opening image of the evening, when Brecht’s beggars and lowlifes lined up to stare angrily at us costumed mostly as Studio 54 rent boys and leather-bar hustlers. Though Scott Elliott’s production, costumed by Isaac Mizrahi, has been staged in the converted Studio 54 itself, the familiar late-1970’s concept is a colossal blunder.

The piece isn’t about coked-up hedonism, but the exploited poor. No beggar ever touched your heart with pierced nipples. The hackneyed Studio 54 references ruin the timelessness of Brecht. And, more crucially than anything perhaps, his lowlifes didn’t copy a decadent party crowd. They consciously mimicked the style of the bourgeoisie, as Teflon Dons do in their way today.

Brecht entitled it The Threepenny Opera for good reason. It’s the beggars’ own morality tale—an opera, no less—for our pleasure and instruction. The beggars and grotesques are the authors and actors of their own dreams. But they must insinuate danger, not scream it. There isn’t a Kurt Weill song in his supreme, haunting score that isn’t misunderstood here, horribly camped up or plain ruined.

The Brecht-Weill songs must be sung dispassionately, laid back and unself-consciously, ironically refined. There is, in a sense, no “performance” in Brecht’s plays. For all outward, showbizzy display is to be avoided in the cause of direct, primary, almost naïve truth. But nothing here is allowed to speak for itself. “Mac the Knife” is delivered like a smug group dirge. “The Jealousy Duet” is reduced to a crude catfight and shouting match. A brothel scene dissolves into a predictable Day-Glo orgy. “The Army Song” is accompanied by a gang rape (à la Abu Ghraib).

“What bite and tang, what insidious irony, in the clean thrusts of Brecht’s verses,” wrote Harold Clurman. “What economy and lightness in Weill’s songs …. ”

Insidious irony? Lightness? The new translation by the notoriously scatological Wallace Shawn has thrown shit at poets. Mr. Shawn and his director have made what is unique, earthy and beautiful only coarse, labored and deadly. The audience is treated like idiots. Lucy Brown has become a drag queen. Why? But are we meant to be shocked when the actor playing Lucy lifts up his skirt to flash his dick at us? Well, what the hey. Similarly when Alan Cumming’s Macheath turns out to be—ooh!—bisexual. What a surprise! Alan Cumming kissing men and women right there before our eyes!

I’m tired of his pixie bisexuality. Mr. Cumming is no Macheath—least of all a menacing one. He’s still playing the naughty host of Cabaret (and he played him better). He also sings out of tune. Costumed in black studded pants and boots, Mr. Cumming’s loud Macheath sports a Mohawk, a plunging neckline and a glittering silver cross. He looks like a neo-punk bolero dancer. But in this uncertain, ragtag ensemble, which includes Cyndi Lauper as a sentimentalized Jenny (Lotte Lenya’s original role), it’s every man—or woman—for himself.

It’s why, I can only imagine, a favorite performer of mine, the veteran Jim Dale, plays Mr. Peachum as a lovable vaudevillian. Mr. Peachum isn’t a vaudevillian, but Mr. Dale is. And he’s terrific at what he does, and I was glad for a while. His un-Brechtian shtick was at least a sign of authentic life and talent in this cockeyed caravan.

But there can be no grace or redemption for this lot, though Brecht wished it so for his impoverished criminal class pretending to perform an opera at capitalism’s nadir. This is the nadir of the Roundabout Theatre Company instead. Mr. Elliott and Co. couldn’t have done a better job had they set out to destroy a great work of art. Shame on all of them.

What Antonin Artaud has described as a “strange sun”—a light of abnormal intensity that illuminates everything in the theater—can be cruel and merciless. Onstage, there’s nowhere to hide. The stage will always find you out.

Three Days of Rain is not only Ms. Roberts’ Broadway debut. According to the Playbill, it’s her first appearance on the professional stage. For myself, movie stars are one thing—one lucky thing, mostly. It takes an innate talent that’s been kissed by God to make it in the theater.

Ms. Roberts seems, firstly, not to have trained in the field. She lacks the necessary vocal equipment and emotional range. Yet she plays two roles: in the first act, set in 1995, the sensible sister, Nan; in the second act, which takes place in 1960, Nan’s madcap mother Lina, who’s an alcoholic Southerner compared to Zelda Fitzgerald. That might be a virtuoso stretch for the most gifted of actresses.

But Ms. Roberts practically reverses the two roles she’s supposed to play. She suggests neurotic tension in her peculiarly stiff, ill-at-ease performance as the calm, coping Nan, and there’s not even a hint of madness—least of all of a drunk, lost Zelda—in her dull, “adorable” Lina. Her delivery is flat at the best of times, nor can she sustain a Southern accent. Fatally for a stage actress, she possesses no danger, no inner life.

Let be. Mr. Greenberg’s sketchy, minor drama about family secrets, architecture and the creative impulse is a rambling form of theatrical blogging with a dash of gimmicky, faux mystery thrown in. The limited run is a sell-out. Also appearing with Julia Roberts are Paul Rudd and TV star Bradley Cooper. Mr. Rudd overacts in the first act, and Mr. Cooper overacts in both. Santo Loquasto’s costume designs manage to make Ms. Roberts look drab. Three Days of Rain is rumored to have been directed by Joe Mantello.

Penny-Farthing Opera

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter much that an opportunistic, star-driven Broadway show like Three Days of Rain gets produced and succeeds at the box office. It’s normal. What matters—and hurts terribly—is the fiasco the Roundabout Theatre Company has made of Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 The Threepenny Opera. It’s nothing that I, for one, can remain cool about. The sheer mindlessness of it all left me staggered and in despair. They’ve dropped a cluster-bomb on a masterpiece.

I was accompanied to the performance by Eric Bentley, the man who was most responsible for bringing Brecht’s great plays to America, and whose fine books and essays about the playwright are considered seminal. Let us assume that Mr. Bentley, who translated the lyrics of Kurt Weill’s enduring songs for a production of The Threepenny Opera in the 30’s, has no ax to grind. At 90, alert and still passionate about the theater, he’s done all the ax-grinding he cares to. The sensible Mr. Bentley threw in the towel at the end of the first act.

“No tragedy ever made me suffer so much,” he explained, and headed home.

When he asked me why I was staying for the second act, I replied lamely, “Duty.” But the die was cast in the opening image of the evening, when Brecht’s beggars and lowlifes lined up to stare angrily at us costumed mostly as Studio 54 rent boys and leather-bar hustlers. Though Scott Elliott’s production, costumed by Isaac Mizrahi, has been staged in the converted Studio 54 itself, the familiar late-1970’s concept is a colossal blunder.

The piece isn’t about coked-up hedonism, but the exploited poor. No beggar ever touched your heart with pierced nipples. The hackneyed Studio 54 references ruin the timelessness of Brecht. And, more crucially than anything perhaps, his lowlifes didn’t copy a decadent party crowd. They consciously mimicked the style of the bourgeoisie, as Teflon Dons do in their way today.

Brecht entitled it The Threepenny Opera for good reason. It’s the beggars’ own morality tale—an opera, no less—for our pleasure and instruction. The beggars and grotesques are the authors and actors of their own dreams. But they must insinuate danger, not scream it. There isn’t a Kurt Weill song in his supreme, haunting score that isn’t misunderstood here, horribly camped up or plain ruined.

The Brecht-Weill songs must be sung dispassionately, laid back and unself-consciously, ironically refined. There is, in a sense, no “performance” in Brecht’s plays. For all outward, showbizzy display is to be avoided in the cause of direct, primary, almost naïve truth. But nothing here is allowed to speak for itself. “Mac the Knife” is delivered like a smug group dirge. “The Jealousy Duet” is reduced to a crude catfight and shouting match. A brothel scene dissolves into a predictable Day-Glo orgy. “The Army Song” is accompanied by a gang rape (à la Abu Ghraib).

“What bite and tang, what insidious irony, in the clean thrusts of Brecht’s verses,” wrote Harold Clurman. “What economy and lightness in Weill’s songs …. ”

Insidious irony? Lightness? The new translation by the notoriously scatological Wallace Shawn has thrown shit at poets. Mr. Shawn and his director have made what is unique, earthy and beautiful only coarse, labored and deadly. The audience is treated like idiots. Lucy Brown has become a drag queen. Why? But are we meant to be shocked when the actor playing Lucy lifts up his skirt to flash his dick at us? Well, what the hey. Similarly when Alan Cumming’s Macheath turns out to be—ooh!—bisexual. What a surprise! Alan Cumming kissing men and women right there before our eyes!

I’m tired of his pixie bisexuality. Mr. Cumming is no Macheath—least of all a menacing one. He’s still playing the naughty host of Cabaret (and he played him better). He also sings out of tune. Costumed in black studded pants and boots, Mr. Cumming’s loud Macheath sports a Mohawk, a plunging neckline and a glittering silver cross. He looks like a neo-punk bolero dancer. But in this uncertain, ragtag ensemble, which includes Cyndi Lauper as a sentimentalized Jenny (Lotte Lenya’s original role), it’s every man—or woman—for himself.

It’s why, I can only imagine, a favorite performer of mine, the veteran Jim Dale, plays Mr. Peachum as a lovable vaudevillian. Mr. Peachum isn’t a vaudevillian, but Mr. Dale is. And he’s terrific at what he does, and I was glad for a while. His un-Brechtian shtick was at least a sign of authentic life and talent in this cockeyed caravan.

But there can be no grace or redemption for this lot, though Brecht wished it so for his impoverished criminal class pretending to perform an opera at capitalism’s nadir. This is the nadir of the Roundabout Theatre Company instead. Mr. Elliott and Co. couldn’t have done a better job had they set out to destroy a great work of art. Shame on all of them.

This latter quality takes center stage in Seeing, Mr. Saramago’s sequel to Blindness. Set four years later in the same unnamed national capital of a country very much like Mr. Saramago’s native Portugal, Seeing concerns a crisis in political self-expression: how to shore up a government’s legitimacy when 85 percent of the ballots in a national election are simply returned blank. This is no Bush v. Gore question of interpreting the voter intent behind botched ballots; this, rather, is the ultimate vote of no confidence.

As with that other, earlier epidemic of blankness, no one has a clear fix on the deeper meaning beneath the opaque course of events. The most that any confessed blank voter—or “blankers,” as they soon come to be known—will explain under state interrogation is: “I’m not to blame for what you call the result, I voted as I wanted to vote, within the law, now it’s up to you … to respond.”

The bemused narrator has some theories of his own, largely to do with the media’s panicked debauching of the common weal; his sentiments (which students of our own media will find particularly apropos) are well worth quoting at length: “Driven by an understandable urge to try and please everyone, some newspapers thought they could combat the absence of readers by plastering their pages with naked bodies, whether male or female, together or alone, singly or in pairs, at rest or in action, disporting themselves in modern gardens of delight, but the readers, grown impatient with images whose minimal and not particularly arousing variations in color and configuration had, even in remote antiquity, been considered banal commonplaces of man’s exploration of the libido, continued, out of apathy, indifference and even nausea, to cause print-runs and sales to plummet …. [T]he old game of public virtues masking private vices, the jolly carousel of private vices elevated to the status of public virtues, which, until recently, had never lacked for spectators or for candidates willing to strut their stuff, failed to have a favorable impact on the day-to-day balance sheet of debit and credit, which was at an irremediably low ebb. It really seemed as if the majority of the city’s inhabitants were determined to change their lives, their tastes and their style.”

This mordant, allusive and digressive mini-dissertation perfectly captures Mr. Saramago’s style—the sort of writing that “lapidary” was coined to describe. At times, it gets away from him, and he succumbs to metafiction gimmicks like commenting on gaps in the narrative’s chronology and plausibility. But Seeing nonetheless builds into a compelling saga of state intrigue, as the nation’s governing class interprets the populace’s strategic silence as subversion, hostility and—by the novel’s end—a virtual act of war.

The state’s first response is, of course, a procedural one: The initial vote occurred on a fearsomely rainy day and must be an aberration, the nation’s leaders reason. They schedule a make-up vote. When that vote, too, yields an identical 85 percent count of blankness, they decide to answer secession with secession, moving the entire administrative apparatus of the state out of the capital city under cover of night. Like spurned lovers, the departing leaders set out “to isolate the population and then leave them to simmer,” so as to break a near-unanimous turn of the civic mind they deem “too perfect to be real.”

This new gambit fizzles. “It seemed that the police were, after all, not essential for the city’s security, that the population itself, spontaneously and in a more or less organized manner, had taken over their work as vigilantes.”

Eventually, the government-in-exile resolves to connect up the present crisis to the earlier one. The prime minister declares “the blindness of those days has returned in a new guise,” and proposes a “parallel between the blankness of that blindness of four years ago and the blind casting of blank ballot papers now.” Yet for this to be anything more than a rhetorical claim, there has to be a bad actor to pivot both events forward—what our own maximum crisis manager likes to call an “evildoer.” The closest the leaders can come is the sole woman who survived the blindness epidemic with her sight intact: the wife of the ophthalmologist who first diagnosed the virus. After a citizen-vigilante writes a letter denouncing her—citing trespasses she also allegedly committed during the blindness plague—the nation’s interior minister dispatches a surveillance team to produce evidence of her guilt, by means honest or otherwise.

At this point, one midlevel bureaucrat recognizes that a line has been crossed—Bertolt Brecht famously described it as the moment when “a government dissolves the people and decides to elect another.” The consequences are suitably grim and dystopian, but true to form, Mr. Saramago abjures any permanent judgment: “The genetic code of what, somewhat unthinkingly, we have been content to call human nature, cannot be reduced to the organic helix of deoxyribonucleic acid, or dna, there is much more to be said about it and it has much more to tell us, but human nature is, figuratively speaking, the complementary spiral that we have not yet managed to prise out of kindergarten.” Or as one of his characters puts it, altogether more poetically: “When we are born, when we enter this world, it is as if we signed a pact for the rest of our life, but a day may come when we will ask ourselves, Who signed this on my behalf.”

Early reviews of Mr. Saramago’s book have made much of its topicality, how it mirrors all manner of recent political crises, from Bush v. Gore to the “war on terror” to this month’s immigration rallies. But the larger point about this searching, dry-witted, spot-on political parable is its pertinence to any political age in which government is blind to the will of the governed.

Chris Lehmann is an editor at CQ Weekly and the author of Revolt of the Masscult (Prickly Paradigm).

I don't mean Mr. Pacino alone, though he's bad enough. I mean everything about this gleefully foolish, patronizing, un-Brechtian, irredeemably rotten three-hour production. I'll tell you what I really think in a moment.

Brecht himself asked us to think about his morality plays and take action accordingly. Very well: Let's protest for once and make our voices heard. There comes a time when the sound of lusty boos would be more than music to the ears. It would be a sign that theater audiences are actually alive and kicking.

Forget, for the moment, that Arturo Ui , Brecht's 1941 parody of Hitler, has been turned into an awesomely glib comment on today's America, forget that instead of "Deutschland Über Alles" and a Nazi salute, we're given the strains of "The Star-Spangled Banner" as Mr. Pacino's Hitler and the cast place their hands on their hearts. The distinguished British director, Simon McBurney, means to warn us about our own Nazi government. Well, we must thank him very much for popping over to tell us. It's surely an unintended irony that this blundering production takes place at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University, just a couple of blocks from Ground Zero. But it isn't Mr. McBurney's interpolation we object to so much as its lameness.

The crucial test of any propaganda play-whether of the right or left-is as Eric Bentley (Brecht's long-time champion in America) defined it: Does the propaganda persuade those who don't agree with it? Does it even have those who disagree on the ropes?

The answer here is: not a chance. The exercise itself is a waste of time. Who is this production for? As that fawning Arturo Ui audience-who forked out $115 a ticket to see the stars-rises at the end to give Mr. Pacino & Co. an unthinking standing ovation, you have to wonder whether they know what they're doing. Do they know anything about the Marxist Brecht or what they've just seen? Does it matter?

It matters if you still care a bit about theater and what, of late, it's coming to. I believe we need Brecht urgently. We need his radical social truths and his authentic, uncompromised moral debates. If nothing else, we need him as a rigorous antidote to easy sentiment onstage and off. But this botched Arturo Ui isn't theater and it isn't Brecht. It's an empty ritual for narcissistic celebs and brain-dead worshippers who've been given the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval by the presence of a visiting British director. If it's British, it must be great!

Let it be said that with Mr. McBurney, it usually is. As the inspired director of the Theatre de Complicite in London, few directors have given me more pleasure or touched such greatness as he has. Those who've seen his imaginatively compelling productions, such as Mnemonic last season, The Street of Crocodiles or The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol will know why we embraced his work as the drowning cling to a life raft in an awfully literal world. But as a gun for hire with a starry American cast, Mr. McBurney has resorted to a leaden literalness that's the very opposite of everything he does.

Brecht's own didacticism and use of supertitles in Arturo Ui can seem obvious enough without the director showing us film of Hitler, lest we miss the point. In its macabre, farcical way, the play is already simple-minded enough. It's an epic cartoon. It isn't major Brecht. Arturo Ui is a historical parable a child could understand. A small-time gangster, Arturo, "a simple son of the Bronx," takes over the cauliflower market of mythical Chicago with his goonish henchmen. It's a blatant caricature of Hitler's rise to power with clear references to the likes of Goebbels and Goering, as well as to the Reichstag fire and occupation of Austria. Yet the new production is so messy and incoherent there were stretches, including the ludicrously overmiked prologue, when I had trouble following what was actually going on.

Al Pacino's Arturo is a perverse version of an exhausted Marlon Brando playing Richard III with a schlump, not a hump. Mr. Pacino and gangsters go together like stars and stripes, and his Richard III has been knocking around in various incarnations since the beginning of time. Even so, his stage appearances are rare, and we always look forward to them. We like to Pacino with Big Al. It's necessary to enter the dangerous spirit of things to enjoy the internal convulsiveness of him and see what's cooking behind homicidal eyes. He'll make-I thought excitedly-a compulsive Hitler.

But there's no fire in him here and, fatally, no danger. I'm afraid it's a flat, humorless, one-note performance, and we've seen the performance one too many times before. It's inconceivable that Arturo/Hitler doesn't threaten us in any way. Mr. Pacino must freeze our blood or have us rocking with laughter, or both. Yet he does neither. His interpretation isn't big but small scale. Of all things, he's given us a recessive Hitler.

It's a terrible choice. From the star's first crabby appearance, he's hiding from us-cringing and wishing to be invisible. It's the opposite of everything Brecht's text (and the role) demands. Mr. Pacino's small-time hood would have remained a nobody, and a muted Hitler is no Hitler at all.

"Mr. Pacino's enjoyably audacious performance," The Times ' Ben Brantley writes admiringly, "is about an id in search of an ego." But Brecht's plays aren't concerned with psychology. There is no inner psychological reality to Brecht, only the reality he gives us.

It might be that Arturo Ui has lost its punch over the years. It's hard to tell with a production as wayward as this. But for Mr. Brantley to claim that the play has never provided any fresh insights into the rise of Hitler is again misinformed. The mighty Kenneth Tynan raved over the relevance of the benchmark Berliner Ensemble production he saw in the late 50's: "Macabre farce on this level of inventiveness was something I had never been struck by before in any theater," Tynan wrote. Harold Clurman found the play a revelation in 1960: "We are confronted with a living thing which is full of meaning and has immeasurably greater impact than anything I have witnessed in years," he wrote. Jan Kott vividly recalled a 1963 Polish production that starred a flabby, famous clown of the day as Arturo conjuring up one of the greatest scenes he had seen in the theater-and one of the most terrifying. "From the first to the last scene he is a clown; but not once does he make the audience laugh," Kott wrote. "And this is his greatest achievement. Hitler was not funny. Murderers are never funny, even when they are clowns."

Then again, the leading British drama critic, Michael Billington of the Guardian, described the Arturo Ui of the late, fabled Leonard Rossiter as one of the finest comic performances he had ever seen. I saw that 1969 London production, directed by Michael Blakemore, and like The Great Dictator, Rossiter's fevered, sweaty comic genius somehow made evil funny-and the more we laughed, the more horrifying Hitler became.

So the signs are that the play itself might still be disturbing on different levels and at least dazzle us. But Brecht cries out for unadorned clarity, not staginess; artlessness, not artificiality. Above all, it needs a mesmerizing performance in the central role. The changes that have been made to the original play by the McBurney production border on insult. The music is loudly, showily intrusive, a form of theatrical Muzak that's sometimes fashionable (Tom Waits), sometimes classical (extracts from Shostakovich that have been left over, it seems, from a two-year-old theater piece directed by Mr. McBurney about Shostakovich). The rag bag of tricks includes the hackneyed use of moody slow motion to end a scene when speed is of the essence. All in all, the production feels thrown together-as if we've been allowed into a private work in progress. But where is it meant to be heading?

The labored Keystone Kops approach for Arturo's goons might have stood a chance if anyone had been in the least funny. They're wearing imaginary red noses like frantic second-rate comedians in search of a laugh that will not come. Their notion of "being Brechtian'' appears to be such an absurd, twitchy faith in overacting, it's as if the intention is to do in Brecht. They've succeeded. Guest appearances by Billy Crudup, Steve Buscemi, Chazz Palminteri, Charles Durning, Lothaire Bluteau, the usually superb Linda Emond and John Goodman et al. are no use to us if they're at sea.

Brecht's alienation theories of theater are always much discussed. Too much! But "alienation" was basically his reaction against the overheated acting that's going on here (or the over-emotional German acting of his day). He was after a sense of cool detachment. We're grateful, then, to Tony Randall, a ham actor playing a ham actor, for gracefully underplaying the amusing role of the clapped-out Actor who teaches Arturo/Hitler the tricks of the trade in the play's most famous scene. The old pro obviously took a withering look at what was going on around him and underacted onstage for only the second time in his life. The first time was as Khlestakov in Gogol's The Government Inspector, though not everyone agrees.

But the pickings are otherwise slim. The closing, juvenile image that's intended to be a warning about Nazi America takes the strudel. Brecht's critique of Western decadence is built into his plays, particularly in the great works with Kurt Weill, and the lessons of Arturo Ui aren't difficult to grasp. But if we are additionally to be told that Hitler is back ruling here and "the bitch that bore him is in heat again," it must be well told. Not glibly, not foolishly, but well.

The entire shoddy production should be booed off the stage. Passive audiences are dead audiences, and we have a right to expect so much more than this insulting stuff. May just 12 people make their voices heard in protest during that oh-so-self-effacing curtain call as the adoring, fawning audience rises in thoughtless salute to the stars. And we will celebrate, you and I. We shall give theater a wake-up call, and together we'll toast its future. If not, show me the way to the next whiskey bar.