Word: weills
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Lotte Lenya owned Kurt Weill's music long before she became his widow. Her ravished soprano perfectly matched the temper of his Berlin theater songs-tough, bragging, wicked, hopeless-and no one could have done more with Bertolt Brecht's lyrics than a singer whose voice combines the chilling qualities of sober screams and drunken laughter. Even now-years past the peak of her career-Lenya's artistic claim frightens other singers off her turf...
Wicked Wise. It did, that is, until last fall, when Martha Schlamme recorded a full album of Weill's best compositions. The album includes songs from Weill's days with Brecht, as well as his later and sweeter French and American music (J'attends un navire, My Ship). Last week Interloper Schlamme extended her welcome trespass by turning up in a Bowery theater-café called The Howff with a show devoted entirely to Weill. The show and its setting would have been just right for Lenya, but Schlamme could hardly be better...
...sings from a stage bare of any decoration but the evening's credo, Für Weill, written in chalk against a black wall. With an excellent Weillian pianist named Abe Stokman to accompany her, she approaches each of Weill's many moods, relying only on her powerful gift for expression to keep the chameleonic program together. Will Holt, a showman who shares the stage, does his bit in the wicked-wise style common to Weill-Brecht productions, but Schlamme's dulcet performance enriches the irony Weill's Berlin songs depend upon. Her voice never sugars...
Collectors of Tomorrow. Even such big stamp dealers as Raymond H. Weill of New Orleans, who bought last week's Hawaiian Missionary, cater to a barely profitable business with thousands of youngsters because they hope that enough of them will grow up to be the big and wealthy collectors of tomorrow. But while stamp collectors have earned a reputation as quiet and retiring types, they have sometimes proved to be less than perfect models for the kiddies. A one-penny Mauritius "Post Office" Red recently sold in England for $23,800 is known to have belonged to an unlikely...
...real shame. Anne Bancroft contributes a valiant performance, and Eric Bentley's revised translation is more smooth and idiomatic than his previous efforts (while avoiding the Runyanesque inaccuracy of Blitzstein's Threepenny Opera). The least known of Brecht's musical collaborators, Paul Dessau, successfully broadens the tradition of Weill, Hindemith and Eisler. Unfortunately, the modified orchestra blares his tunes over Miss Bancroft's not-brassy-enough voice...