Word: songed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Germany's newest song hit was hummed in streetcars, in movie theaters and at political meetings. Radio Berlin used the opening bars for a musical call signal. Its slow march tune was catchy, and its lyrics fitted Berlin's melancholy mood...
...actually 13 years old. It was first sung in 1933 by prisoners in the Börgermoor concentration camp as they marched off to drain the nearby peat bogs. Prisoners secretly wrote it on barracks walls, whispered it at slave labor chores; it became the favorite song of the German underground. Anti-Nazi Germans took it to Spain with them, taught it to their comrades in the International Brigade. As The Peat-Bog Soldiers it was brought to the U.S. by Loyalist veterans, recorded by Paul Robeson...
Even without a thorough grounding in the classical Chinese theatre, one feels that "Lute Song" has preserved the essential spirit of a lyrical drama with a simple, fairy tale-like atmosphere unfamiliar to must American theatre goers. The unadorned plot--a story similar to Chancer's "Patient Griselda"--remains intact through the translation and condensation into one-third the original length, as do elements of Confucian ethics and what appears to be satire of Buddhist ritual...
...accent, does his best opposite Miss Martin in a somewhat sterile part. The other 45 actors named in the program are mainly character bit players who are competent but have little chance to become outstanding; perhaps Rex O'Mailey was most noticeable because of his Gilbert-and-Sullivan-like song in the first act (the only solo, incidentally, not sung by Brynner or Miss Martin...
Producer Myerberg appears to have sunk a small fortune into "Lute Song" It is well produced, directed, and acted, and the play is a good one. It does not appear, however, at this early stage, that a public weaned on "Good Night Ladies" or "Carousel" will be enthusiastic over a production as unusual as this...