Word: blitzstein
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...Marc Blitzstein, under a Koussevitzky commission, found these in "The Little-Foxes" by Lillian Hellman, and he calls the product "Regina." The play deals with a decadent, bickering Southern family which breaks to pieces over an unscrupulous money deal. The composer has worked into this a ball with many Southern belles and several appearances of singing and playing Negroes. In general the music effectively increases the tension, though, with a lack of variation in the first act which is exasperating. Many of the arias, particularly those of the sweet, flighty Birdie, are genuine mood pieces, effectively incorporating devices...
...spite of these criticisms, however, Blitzstein's work is a success, and not only because he shows that an American can write a serious musical which is theatrically effective. The libretto--which he wrote himself--is concise with a welcome absence of trivia. The arias get somewhere and the words are skillfully treated in the music. Only once does he allow himself to be led astray by his social conscience into a long scene in which the Negroes make fun of the gossipping society at Regina's ball...
...time it rang true. Many established playwrights seemed to be between plays. Of shows hopefully announced for production so far, only a handful involved old hands: Terence Rattigan's Double Bill (a London import); a Maxwell Anderson-Kurt Weill dramatization of the novel Cry, the Beloved Country; Marc Blitzstein's musical version of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes; an S. N. Behrman adaptation called I Know My Love (with Alfred Lunt & Lynn Fontanne); a new Cole Porter musical, Heaven and Earth; Garson Kanin's The Rat Race...
...Cradle Will Rock (by Marc Blitzstein; produced by Michael Myerberg) had trouble, ten years ago, finding a stage; Washington, for reasons never explained, ordered the original WPA production to "postpone" its opening. But once Orson Welles took it to Broadway, The Cradle had no trouble finding an audience. For if brash and biased, Marc Blitzstein's "play in music" about Steeltown's big bad boss, cringing sycophants and exulting strikers had zip and the Zeitgeist in its favor. It also had a good deal of theatrical novelty: a sceneryless stage that antedated Our Town's; Composer Blitzstein...
...last week's revival, instead of Blitzstein at a solitary piano, there was a white-tied Leonard Bernstein conducting a tiny orchestra. Bernstein did well by The Cradle's sometimes crude, sometimes clever music. But time had been less kind to The Cradle itself. It seemed more strident and less exciting; it had also become less topical. Its cockiness about labor- which had led it to treat the bosses with contemptuous laughter rather than bitter words-seemed early New Deal, not postwar. The Cradle's stagecraft, far from seeming daring, almost seemed dated. Only where Blitzstein...