A Weill Henchman: Must You Be On The Right Track?

Last week, thanks to Greg's commitment to affordable ticket-buying, the two of us saw LoveMusik, the new musical based on the letters between Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. I want to have at it before the critics do, lest I be accused of just rehashing their points.

Amazingly, Greg, our former theater prof Sam, and I all had the exact same criticism of the show: It was, like, half-assedly Brechtian. Now, this is a specific enough criticism that when it comes from three sources, you know it's got to be accurate. The production had some trademark Brechtian elements—a second proscenium, time and place captions before each scene—but it had absolutely no Brechtian message. And the whole point of doing it Brecht-style is to get some point across and effect change (sorry, old theater professors, if I'm totally butchering this). There was no call to action here...in fact, there was more or less no dramatic tension here. It was just the story of Weill's life, focusing on his relationship with his wife. Which made it slow as hell.

I love Weill's music, really I do. And I love Michael Cerveris and Donna Murphy. But the music didn't come across that well in very forced contexts...although I liked the amusing "Schickelgruber," a song about Hitler rising to power from shameful origins (Schickelgruber was Hitler's last name at birth, apparently). I also sometimes find translations of his German songs a little unwieldy. That much female angst doesn't play especially well in English. And I was really bothered by the crappy humor. It seems to be a common problem that characters with accents (ugh, the accents) will make a very unclever joke and the director will expect a laugh. Is there someone writing or directing this that thinks they're just touching on such timeless comic themes the jokes will, of course, be funny? (Such timeless comic themes might include "my husband is such a slob!" "He eats so much!" That sort of crap.) If someone's speaking in an accent, you have to work harder to make it funny enough to get a laugh. This show gave up on humor somewhere in the middle of the first scene.

So yeah, I was disappointed. I'm still waiting for a show with great Weill music. Maybe one day they'll revive One Touch of Venus. That one seems like it might have promise.