Word: weills
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...Darion expect the bulk of their royalties to result from the opera fever that has broken out across the U.S. among amateur and semi-pro groups. University workshops in particular have eagerly seized on such short works as Gian-Carlo Menotti's The Tele phone and Kurt Weill's Down in the Valley. In that company archy and mehitabel should easily hold its own: it is consistently imaginative and toujours...
...musical. And the Phoenix's Golden Apple, like the Theatre de Lys' End As a Man, like the Circle in the Square's Girl on the Via Flaminia, went uptown in time to Broadway. Other off-Broadway successes: Marc Blitzstein's English version of Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera, Leslie Stevens' Bullfight, and-after a late opening the season before-The World of Sholem Aleichem...
...musical numbers recall German café music of the hungry '20s. The artfully threadbare orchestration gives them a kind of tawdry elegance, as of faded Viennese waltzes with indecisive endings. Among the best: Pirate Jenny, appealingly rasped by Composer Weill's widow, Lotte Lenya,* dreaming of an escape from drudgery by joining a pirate crew; the Ballad of Dependency, in which Comedienne Charlotte Rae derides Macheath's virility...
...operas of his day. Gay's comedy turned out to be the smash hit of the 18th century, so popular that it forced London's chief composer of Italian opera, George Frederick Handel, to shutter his own fashionable opera house and ultimately turn to writing oratorios. The Weill version took little but the characters from John Gay, was itself a satire on grandiose German operas. It so inflamed musical conservatives in Berlin that students rioted and stoned the theater where it was playing...
Manhattan's new version is neither a smash hit nor a matter for riot. It sometimes bogs down in prosy prose and amateurish acting. But the enthusiasm of audiences for Weill's score shows there's life in the old beggar...