Word: lenya
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Caricature Capitalism. Both Weill and Brecht, recalls Weill's widow, Singer Lotte Lenya, were fascinated by the America they knew "from books, movies, popular songs, headlines-the America of the garish Twenties, with its Capones, Texas Guinans, Aimee Semple MacPhersons, Ponzis, and the Murderess Ruth Snyder." The mythical city of Mahagonny (pronounced mah-hah-ge-nee) was a symbol of that imaginary America, and the city's reason for being was summed up in the name of its principal hotel: the Here-You-May-Do-Anything Inn. The opera's songs marked a turning point for Composer...
...death in images of savage bite and lyrical beauty. Among the vivid images in Brecht on Brecht: Anne Jackson miming the simple glories of the world for her unborn son; Dane Clark doing an amusing Method depth-probe of which hat to wear for a four-minute part: Lotte Lenya conjuring up the ghostly, ghastly Berlin of the '20s and '30s in a raspy voice of tuneless authority. The Brecht on Brecht company of six actors is consistently bold, often astonishing, rarely commonplace. And doing Brecht at all is a salient rebuke to Broadway's timorous titans...
What to do? In desperation, Mrs. Stone consults an aristocratic procuress, a ludicrous old mascaraed barracuda who calls herself La Contessa Magda Terribili-Gonzales (Lotte Lenya). The lady provides Mrs. Stone with a handsome young escort called Paolo (Warren Beatty), who has big shoulders and a small title. No fool like an old fool. She falls absurdly in love with the boy, belabors him with costly presents and senescent lust. In the end, of course, he gets tired of it all and runs off with a Hollywood cinemama who offers him more fun, and more money...
...deem, from American productions of Die Dreigroschenoper): marquee lights glitter from the proscenium, news of each scene is projected on a screen from slides (a Ia Chaplin), and poor old Maggie Ziskind, cast as the Widow Leosadia Begbick, a saloon-keeping trollop, has to bundle up in ratty Lotte Lenya togs and belt out a couple of those sour songs that were Mrs. Weill's stock-in-trade. (The words for most of these songs are by Mr. Bentley, the music--as Wall-ish as a composer of Sing Musel can make it--by Mr. Joseph Raposo...
...movie is full of inconsistencies. Jenny, the prostitute who turns Mack over to the police, is never really a part of the story, and was kept only because of the exigencies of the plot, a spark of loyalty to the original version, and Lotte Lenya's availability. And Lenya sings her one song with such grace and pathos that she steals the movie...