Word: blitzstein
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...several levels on which the play is totally triumphant. Bertolt Brecht's writing is an extraordinary synthesis of wit, imagination, political commitment, and human insight. Kurt Weill's brash, deceptively melodic music intensifies the force of the drama spectacularly. No adaptation could be more faithful than Mark Blitzstein's to the atmosphere Brecht and Weill sought to create, truer to their message or more sympathetic to their dramatic approach. But if the drama is to succeed on stage, these achievements must be equalled by the director's intelligence and the cast's performance. The Harvard Summer School Repertory Theater...
...bank to the founding of one?" he asks. A mounted messenger promptly rushes up to knight him, though Brecht reassures us that real life would not have come out so happily. We are left with Weill's corrosive tunes and a second-act reminder that shines through Marc Blitzstein's generally smooth translation: "For even honest men may act like sinners, unless they've had their customary dinners...
September Song's first section consists of a large chunk of Threepenny Opera. The cast-does a fairly good interpretation of this masterpiece of the Brecht-Weill collaboration, although Marc Blitzstein's creaky English translations, especially of "How to Survive" and "Pirate Jenny," are beginning to show their age. Blitzstein's lyrics do not fit the rhythm of the music as well as they should, and it may well be time for someone to try his hand at a new version. Blitzstein's "Mack the Knife," of course, will never be replaced, but the rest of his songs are uneven...
...undergraduate, Bernstein conducted a Harvard performance of Marc Blitzstein's "The Cradle Will Rock." He was musical editor of The Advocate, accompanist for the Glee Club, and a member of the Music Club. Bernstein lived in Eliot House...
...Blitzstein, who taught at the Downtown School in New York during the thirties with none other than Elie Siegmeister and Hans Eisler as colleagues, inspired Lehrman to take a new look at Brecht's 1948 didactic play about the Paris Commune-or, more precisely, Blitzstein with an interpretational gloss thrown on his work by Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein in 1940 presented a production at Sanders of Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock. Bernstein adopted a "cantata form, from the piano." Lehrman, himself the director of a 1969 Cradle Will Rock production, explained in a 1970 essay about Blitzstein. This is "exactly...