Word: lenya
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...pieces of several prints discovered after a long search of Europe. It is unquestionably an antique, with scratchy sound, uncertain lighting and a mannered kind of acting carried over from the silent films.. But it is not the sort of antique that must be watched with embarrassment. Lotte Lenya, as Jennie, is gawkily charming, and such Kurt Weill-Bert Brecht songs as Mack the Knife and Pirate Jenny retain their peculiar combination of sentiment and cynicism, even when filtered through English subtitles. Viewers who have seen the English stage version that has played for several years in Manhattan...
Weill: Die Dreigroschenoper-The Threepenny Opera (Lotte Lenya, with supporting cast and orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Bruckner-Ruggeberg; Colum-bia, 2 LPs). Composer Weill's widow Lotte Lenya (TIME, Aug. n) went to Berlin last winter to handpick and train singers, direct a 30th anniversary recording of the complete score (including some lusty, gutsy sections never before performed) for the first time in Bertolt Brecht's inimitable original German. The result is by far the best recorded recreation of Kurt Weill's jazzy, bitterly ironic score, with Singer Lenya herself heading a first-rate cast. Every sardonic...
...crowd had turned out to hear was a concert version of the Marc Blitzstein adaptation of Threepenny Opera, which last week marked its 1,200th performance at the off-Broadway Theater de Lys. Dressed in a royal blue frock, her carroty blonde hair drawn loosely back with combs, Lenya appeared in the role she created in Berlin in 1928 and made famous-that of Jenny, the bitter, dream-haunted London prostitute...
Poverty & Corruption. "I hear all my melodies," Kurt Weill once said, "sung in my inner ear by Lenya." The daughter of an illiterate Viennese coachman, she started singing at four in a neighborhood carnival; she still recalls being hauled at night out of the coal bin where she slept and made to warble sentimental favorites for her drunken father. Having mastered the techniques of standing on her head and walking a tightrope, Lenya enrolled at the Stadttheater in Zurich, worked up a dance act and moved on to Berlin. There she played the subway circuit, usually in Shakespeare. The year...
...simply echoed himself. Moreover, the lyrics by the late Marxist poet Bertolt Brecht, while brilliant in their own guttersnipe way, carry little of their original meaning for the U.S. in 1958: harsh cynicism can date as easily as gaslight sentimentality. Yet there is in the music-and in Lenya-a quality that defies time. "Threepenny Opera," she says, "will be good a hundred years from now. Corruption and poverty don't go out of fashion...