The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny: Difference between revisions

* [[Death By Gluttony]]: Jacob dies because eating is what he enjoys the most, so he eats to death.

* [[Deus Ex Machina]]: Attempted in ''The God of Mahagonny'', [[It Gets Worse]].

* [[Doomed Protagonist]]: Jimmy never had a chance.

* [[Downer Ending]]: Mahagonny gets destroyed by the struggle of different factions and the fail of providing desired commodities to all.

* [[Suddenly Ethnicity]]: "I am from Havana. My mother was a white woman." ("Ich bin aus Havana. Meine Mutter war eine Weisse.") The role was originally written without a specific actress in mind, but was given to Miss [[Lotte Lenya]] (an Austrian redhead) for the original performance.

** Nowadays, how surprising this is depends on the casting. It's not much of a shock that Audra McDonald's Jenny (pictured above) presumably had an Afro-Cuban father.

* [[Soiled City On a Hill]]

* [[Those Two Bad Guys]]: Trinity Moses and Fatty The Bookkeeper.

* [[Wretched Hive]]

* [[Your Days Are Numbered]]: A 2010 Berlin performance toys with this. In the original play, two characters die from sheer decadence: one by overeating and one by losing a boxing match. In the 2010 performance, the stage directions were projected onto a screen and often ignored or even protested by the characters, following Brecht's philosophy of "Verfremdung". So when Jacob sees that the stage directions say he has to die, he first starts protesting, then laughing, then whimpering, then falls over helplessly and ''stays there for the rest of the act while other characters are swimming in money around his corpse''. He's joined by the boxer character (Joe) soon after. The performance is... unsettling.

 

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