Word: brecht
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...five supreme 20th century dramatists, Pirandello, Shaw, O'Neill, and Brecht are dead. Only Beckett remains, slowly adding masterpiece to masterpiece...
Lotte Lenya owned Kurt Weill's music long before she became his widow. Her ravished soprano perfectly matched the temper of his Berlin theater songs-tough, bragging, wicked, hopeless-and no one could have done more with Bertolt Brecht's lyrics than a singer whose voice combines the chilling qualities of sober screams and drunken laughter. Even now-years past the peak of her career-Lenya's artistic claim frightens other singers off her turf...
Wicked Wise. It did, that is, until last fall, when Martha Schlamme recorded a full album of Weill's best compositions. The album includes songs from Weill's days with Brecht, as well as his later and sweeter French and American music (J'attends un navire, My Ship). Last week Interloper Schlamme extended her welcome trespass by turning up in a Bowery theater-café called The Howff with a show devoted entirely to Weill. The show and its setting would have been just right for Lenya, but Schlamme could hardly be better...
...pianist named Abe Stokman to accompany her, she approaches each of Weill's many moods, relying only on her powerful gift for expression to keep the chameleonic program together. Will Holt, a showman who shares the stage, does his bit in the wicked-wise style common to Weill-Brecht productions, but Schlamme's dulcet performance enriches the irony Weill's Berlin songs depend upon. Her voice never sugars the music or weakens the words. Even at its prettiest, as an English critic once noted, "the force of her grip is the feeling that she is also fighting...
...suffering of the Jews is very central to her-and central to her songs. She finds Weill and Brecht cultural soul mates, but last summer when she tried out some Weill on a Jewish audience, Brecht's German lyrics caused a near riot. Many in the audience stormed out, and one man began to scream at her, "Stop singing German!" Schlamme left the stage, soothed herself with a deep breath, then returned to the spotlight to freeze her remaining listeners with one final line. "I haven't been so frightened," she said, "since the Hitler Youth chased...