Word: weill
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...savage intensity of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's script and score, probably already familiar to many who will attend this production, director R.J. Cutler sharpens considerably with a raw-edged style of acting and "the meanest nastiest filthie to translation we could find," says one lead. Like the lyrics to the "anti-operatic songs, some of the combative harshness in the acting makes the audience shift uneasily. But it gives them at the same time the feeling that Cutler & Co. meant their skin to crawl this...
Some of the brilliances are to be expected. John Bellucci as Mac the Knife, for instance, turns in a performance steaming with violence and malice, and the Weill songs, despite some weakness in the orchestra, wound and horrify as they must. But there are other, less conventional strengths, each illuminating enough of the production to carry it past awkward moments. Lars Gunnar-Wigemark, snarling and slobbering as he narrates, inspires awe and terror even when he enters unexpectedly carrying a bright pink can of Tab; and Martha Hackett as Jenny, Macheath's favorite whore, provides the evening's most gripping...
...visible orchestra emphasizes the sublime marriage of Brecht's text to Weill's music. The two independent elements complementing each other set forth the positions and ideas presented in each, most notably in the ballads. The ballads, more than the text itself, state the characters' situations objectively. Cutler's staging for these ballads underscores their epic nature; they are the strongest cohesive element of the production. The Second Threepenny Finale: What Keeps Mankind Alive?, which closes the second act, encapsulates the message of the play, "Food is the first thing. Morals follow on." Rarely has the persistence...
...erratic, often jarring orchestral performance, under Frederick Q. Freyer's direction, communicates Weill's epic music with clarity and vigor. Freyer's lyrical arrangement faithfully retains the social gest of the original. Occasionally, he loses control of his players' enthusiasm, and the music overwhelms the singers. Yet the vitality of his conducting and exuberance of the music itself, leaping across the stage to strike the audience's nervous system, adds integrity to the production where the set failed...