Word: lenya
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...clear and briskly energetic (even a bit too much so in the lovely "cranes duet"). Gary Bachlund brings an appropriate touch of Nelson Eddy to the role of the doomed hero, though Anna Steiger (daughter of Rod) plays Jenny with a less happy touch of Jeanette MacDonald. As Lotte Lenya taught a whole generation of admirers, Weill's heroines should sound sexy, metallic and bitter...
Faithfull's voice is eerie, raggedy, shattered. She sounds like Lotte Lenya serenading from a sidecar, but she is completely lacking in either melodrama or self-pity. Songs like Penthouse Serenade and Boulevard of Broken Dreams ("And gigolo and gigolette/ Wake up to find their eyes are wet/ With tears that tell of broken dreams") are the sort of fey selections reliably included on subscription-only albums by chanteuses who play hotel lounges in off- season. Faithfull, however, endows them with real gutter sophistication -- the Boulevard of Broken Dreams never sounded like a mean street before -- and that...
David Flores and Erika Zabusky come off well as Doctor and Lenya Zubritsky, Sophia's parents. Indeed, Zabusky and Valerie Gilbert (Yencha the Vendor) stand out astonishingly for their stage presence and ineffable grace of motion. But the best efforts of acting, directing, and music adaptation cannot save this play from Neil Simon's dark and cynically elitist outlook...
Stratas met Lenya during the rehearsals for Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the Met in 1979. At first Lenya made Stratas nervous; she sensed the older woman's resentment at being supplanted in one of her roles. "It was hard for me to see that shock of red hair and that stern face in the empty house," remembers Stratas. "She was Jenny and I thought that I was hopeless." Only later, as Lenya was dying, did Stratas learn that her performance had deeply affected her colleague-so much so that Lenya gave...
DIED. Lotte Lenya, 83, raspy-voiced, Austrian-born musical actress best known for performing, and later resuscitating, works of Composer Kurt Weill, her first husband; of cancer; in Manhattan. Lenya's signature role, which she premiered in Weimar Berlin, was the prostitute Jenny in Bertolt Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera. The Weills fled Nazism for the U.S. and, especially after Weill's death in 1950, Lenya renewed her career on the Broadway stage (Cabaret) and in spoofy films (From Russia With Love). Said Music Critic Harold Schonberg: "She can put into a song an intensity...