Word: weill
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...that August Strindberg is a hot new agent, but Streep played Miss Julie at Vassar. Beginning her professional stage career in New York only four years ago, she conquered prized roles in Shakespeare (Measure for Measure, Henry V, The Taming of the Shrew), Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard) and Brecht-Weill (Happy End), as well as in works by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. This repertory training came to Meryl because she was ready for it; her education went on in public, but critics and audiences did the learning. Director Arvin Brown expresses what threatens to become a bromide when...
...enterprise this huge, of course, there will be misses as well as hits, and Sellars has his share. Particularly in Gotterdammerung--where many critics say Wagner's inspiration failed him--Sellars falters too. Splicing in whole minutes of Kurt Weill music to back up the leather-jacketed, bar-stool Gibichungs may be a justified comment on their theatrical value in Wagner's original scheme. It also, however, shatters with an axe-stroke of cynicism the mood of benign humor that prevails until them. The musical effect is appalling, the lapse in taste alarming...
...like his curious Rigoletto, have infuriated audiences. Levine's conducting has gained undeserved acclaim in the press. It's forceful, direct, and intractably unsubtle; Levine takes scores and homogenizes them. Furthermore, at a callow 35 he is attempting to conduct everything in the repertory from Mozart to Berg and Weill...
...From the opening bars of the overture, Lehrman takes the score at a gallop. He doesn't give the music the time it needs to fester, to spread its fumes; more importantly, the singers couldn't keep up with the pace. (If you want to hear Weill's music in a really atmospheric performance, pick up the old Berlin recording on Odyssey Records. It's in German, but it's got Lotte Lenya and it's cheap...
Seifter makes good use of a small church as the playhouse, and he paces the scenes well. He even suggests the teeming decay endemic to The Threepenny Opera in the opening scene. But failures of casting and characterization quickly break the spell. Brecht's script speaks directly enough, and Weill's music is brilliant enough, so that even a mediocre performance like Caravan's is worth seeing, especially if you've never seen the show before. But The Threepenny Opera ought to more than entertain; if the director, actors and musicians conspire aright, it can give you a whiff...