Word: weill
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Love Life (music by Kurt Weill; book & lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner; produced by Cheryl Crawford) can boast the Best of Everything-the producer and the librettist of Brigadoon, the composer of Lady in the Dark, the director of A Streetcar Named Desire, the choreographer of Finian's Rainbow, the leading lady of High Button Shoes, the leading man of Annie Get Your Gun. But whether so many top-notchers are like too many cooks, or whether some of them have slipped a notch or two, Love Life is not really a good show; it is only a show...
...setting, the plot, and the words were familiar enough to Londoners. For it was the same bawdy Beggar's Opera that John Gay had written more than two centuries ago. Unlike some others who had tinkered with Gay's libretto (Frederic Austin, Kurt Weill, Duke Ellington), Britten had followed it carefully, keeping to the squalor and backside-slapping of 18th Century London. The music, in its latest disguise, was something else again...
Down in the Valley (Sat. 3 p.m., NBC). Radio premiere of Kurt Weill's American folk opera...
...Scheveningen. Suddenly, during a Bach violin concerto, Soloist Sam Swaap started scrubbing his fiddle discordantly. Then he stopped cold for a dozen bars, holding his fiddle like a broken toy. After embarrassing moments, Swaap got back on the track. After him on the program came French Pianist Janine Weill. She got midway through the last movement of Saint-Saëns's Piano Concerto No. 4, then her fingers became riveted to the keys. The orchestra struggled on by itself for 40 bars before Madame Weill fell in again...
Back in Paris, angry Pianist Weill told French newsmen her tale. Said she: "I had reached the middle of the last movement . . . there were no more difficulties ahead and there was nothing that might have provoked any confusion. Suddenly there was a complete blank in my memory.... I would have taken the whole matter for an unpleasant incident, had I not heard a strange explanation from one of the orchestra's musicians. After the end of the concert, this musician went out on the casino terrace for a drink. At the next table he overheard four men exchanging congratulations...