Word: weills
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Ballad For Americans (Victor). Two-disc album of the patriotic spine-tingler first heard on the Pursuit of Happiness radio program (TIME, Nov. 20). Discounting the influence of Poets Whitman, MacLeish, Anderson and Composer Kurt Weill (Knickerbocker Holiday) on the script and score of Messrs. Robinson and Latouche, even sophisticated listeners should get a kick out of this hopeful musical U. S. history. Paul Robeson, as the Voice Nobody Knows until the last stanza, sings bravely...
Knickerbocker Holiday (book and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson: music by Kurt Weill; produced by the Playwrights' Co.) represents an ill-balanced musicomedy collaboration, suggests the most fleet- footed girl at a prom dancing with a corpulent middle-aged professor who has hopefully taken a few lessons from Arthur Murray. To the story of Xieuw Amsterdam in the days of peg-legged Pieter Stuyvesant. the famed author of Mary of Scotland and Winter set has contributed a thick Dutch cheese of a book, while Composer Weill (Johnny Johnson) has filled Knickerbocker Holiday with gay, spirited, catchy tunes...
Last evening the Playwrights' Company presented a new musical comedy entitled "Knickerbocker Holiday" with book and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, music by Kurt Weill, and the production by Joshua Logan; viewed in toto, the show will not be one of great appeal to collegiate theatregoers...
...Weill's twenty-two numbers are of the operetta type, hardly exciting with the exception of "How Can You Tell an American" and "The Scars", and are excellently rendered by the chorus; the principals, however, are less successful. Mr. Logan's work is good, but Mr. Mielziner's sets are a disappointment. Decidedly the show's happiest interludes come by virtue of the seven burghers of New Amsterdam...
...Paramount). Underworld melodrama, based on a story by Norman Krasna, directed by Fritz Lang, scored by Kurt Weill, acted by Sylvia Sidney and George Raft which, setting out to prove that Crime Does Not Pay, proves instead that the brightest names in Hollywood sometimes make its dullest pictures...