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A very rare and collectable Tom Waits item, this 64 page program to Woyzeck which performed in Europe but this production never came to the US. Productions have been staged in other countries since, but this was the original Robert Wilson production. The libretto features much of the dialogue from the show (in Danish) and while the shows were performed in Danish - the music and lyrics were in English. Many of the songs found their way onto Tom Wait's album "Blood Money" which was released along with "Alice" (another TW stage presentation).
The following is from Robert Wilson's page:
Art Musical by Tom Waits, Kathleen Brennan and Robert Wilson, after the eponymous play fragment by Georg Büchner
Premiered on November 18, 2000 at the Betty Nansen Theater, Copenhagen, Denmark
Performed in Danish.
Woyzeckwas Robert Wilson's third collaboration with Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, afterThe Black Rider(1990) andAlice(1992). The so-called "art musical" first opened at Copenhagen's Betty Nansen Teatret and the original production subsequently went on a European tour, to much international acclaim.
The piece is based on German revolutionary poet Georg Büchner's eponymous play from 1837, which remained a fragment. It is one of the most influential and widely performed plays in German literature. The sinister story is about Franz Woyzeck, a soldier, who struggles for survival, signs up as a subject of human experiments, and gets abused by everyone around him. He develops hallucinations and eventually kills his wife for her unfaithfulness.
This adaptation ofWoyzeckhas frequently been licensed and mounted by other companies and under different directors, notably in German-speaking and Scandinavian countries. To this day, itremains in the repertories of many theaters.
“Mr. Wilson’s collaborations with rock songwriters have sometimes been more like collisions, as the straightforwardness and concision of rock clash with Mr. Wilson’s dream logic and slow-motion timing. But ‘’Woyzeck’’ is his third collaboration with Mr. Waits and Ms. Brennan, and they have reached a détente that’s somewhere near a reimagined surrealist cabaret. Mr. Waits has always had a Kurt Weill streak in his music, subverting pretty melodies with arrangements that creak and clank. Mr. Wilson enjoys the combination of the everyday and the inexplicable, and Mr. Waits’s ballads still let him take his time.”— Jon Pareles in The New York Times, October 31, 2002
