Word: weill
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...Weill: The Unknown Kurt Weill (Nonesuch) Treasures from the The Threepenny Opera composer, sung by Teresa Stratas...
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...
...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...