Word: weill
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HAPPY END is schizophrenic--an anomalous lark. The biting, sardonic music of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht don't fit the sitcom plot. The play's as far from Brecht & Weill's Three penny Opera as a Keystone Kops film is from Little Caesar. Both plays recount the daring misdeeds and romantic entanglements of a gangster, but Threepenny Opera's sordid outlaws become Happy End's petty, bumbling bullies. Despite a denunciation of capitalism tacked on at the end, Happy End is insubstantial fluff, a romantic comedy expertly staged and acted by the American Repertory Theatre Company...
...sweet-talking and the Governor's calm imperturbability enliven a slightly sluggish first act. Kenneth Ryan plays Bill Cracker as a sulky, rughtless lump; he provides a good foil to the more aggressive and articulate Hallelujah Lil. The gang's rather indifferent voices, however, fail to do justice to Weill's music...
...back on Broadway. But this opening night, the perennial pixy was 20 blocks north of his old haunts on the Great White Way, singing with the New York City Opera at Lincoln Center. Grey starred in the first American production of Silverlake, an allegorical opera with music by Kurt Weill, originally produced in Germany in 1933, the place and period of Grey's enormously successful Cabaret. Silverlake's theme, the venal rich vs. the virtuous poor, was so politically powerful in 1933 that Nazi storm troopers broke up performances. New York critics were not that harsh, but some...
...KURT WEILL CABARET...
Something similar occurs when Martha Schlamme and Alvin Epstein sing the Berlin and Broadway songs of Kurt Weill, as they are now doing at Manhattan's Bijou Theater. Singing is a singularly inadequate word; reincarnation is distinctly more appropriate. When these two are onstage, the audience is inside the skulls and the sensibilities of Weill and his most potent collaborator, Bertolt Brecht. One immediate impression is that the lyricist always has an enormous impact on the composer. Rodgers and Hart is light-years away from Rodgers and Hammerstein. In like fashion, Pirate Jenny of Brecht's Threepenny Opera...