Word: weill
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Street Scene (book by Elmer Rice; music & lyrics by Kurt Weill & Langston Hughes; produced by Dwight Deere Wiman & the Playwrights' Co.) is much more folk opera than musical-a re-handling of Elmer Rice's famous outside slice of life almost entirely in musical terms. There are arias as well as tunes; septets, choral passages, large-scale orchestral effects, recitatives. As music, some of this is fancy, facile, too high-pitched. But, thanks to the rest of the score and to the residual vitality in Elmer Rice's play, Street Scene is steadily interesting musical theater...
...good deal less of the old garish street life, the huddled, gabby tenement humanity. But, endangered by a lot of song-&-dance distractions, the story builds much more strongly by leaning on plot rather than people. And it finds time for enough that is human and humorous. Composer Weill (Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark) scores with all his lighter songs and with some of his romantic ones. And there are good people to sing them-notably, opera singer Polyna Stoska, whose beautiful soprano voice is a treat for Broadway. What is more, most of the singers...
Three days before the fight, ominous words came from Servo's camp. Cried Servo's manager Al ("The Vest") Weill: "My boy can't breat' t'rough the right side of his nose; he ain't gonna fight no Robinson. . . ." The official explanation: Servo had been biffed by a sparring partner...
Parts of A Flag Is Born are colorful theater and parts are biting propaganda; there is nice music by Kurt Weill and nice acting by Paul Muni as an uprooted old Jew who dies on the road to Palestine. But the evening is only fitfully effective. Hitting from all sides, working in all moods-now pathetic, now heroic, now angry, now scornful-A Flag Is Born lacks singleness of impact...
...Richard Weill...