Published: May 29, 2007
I was struck by Robert Gottlieb's question in his dance column last week, "How can educated and sophisticated viewers react so differently to a work of art?" Even the best critics sometimes violently disagree, Mr. Gottlieb pointed out evenhandedly, ultimately putting his own preferences for certain dancers and choreographers down to a question of temperament.Perhaps. But for me, a critic is an advocate. He makes a case for his own point of view, and might even create whirlwinds. The mighty Kenneth Tynan revealed a self-flagellating touch when he wrote, "A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car." But many artists—who know the way—have been critics. Tom Stoppard began as a drama critic writing under the pseudonym William Boot, the name of the unlikely star of British journalism in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. G.B. Shaw was a renowned critic, of course; Bertolt Brecht would have made a great one. Audiences make pretty good critics, too—provided they agree with the professional critic.
The truth is, everyone's a critic—particularly in New York. From where the pros sit, on Mount Parnassus, they advocate their personal views and ask, "What do you think?" Agreement isn't essential, but preferred.
I appear to be in an uncomfortable minority of one in not finding Donna Murphy's talent as dazzling as her numerous admirers do. Where others see in her raved-over, Tony-nominated performance in LoveMusik Lotte Lenya's raw emotional complexity and coarse contempt, I can see only Ms. Murphy's smooth technical accomplishment and a coquettish longing to be loved by the audience.
I found LoveMusik itself a strangely tired show—a missed opportunity to achieve something original and genuinely Brechtian with Kurt Weill's music and the story of the Weill-Lenya marriage (and remarriage). Alfred Uhry's hagiography about the tumultuous relationship between the cantor's son and the former hooker, and the legendary Harold Prince's familiar, sub-Brechtian staging, have all the hallmarks of an oversimplified biopic that turns Kurt Weill's genius into a jukebox musical for earnest middlebrows.
You would never know from the show's portraits of a meek, complaisant, apparently long-suffering Weill and the "wild," compulsively unfaithful Lotte that Weill had his own mistress. Their Anglo-German accents are intended to give them authenticity, I assume, and the show an Old World atmosphere. But ven zey are alvayz talking like zees, eetz too much ze Kraut cliché—ya?
Lenya—Weill's leading interpreter—once claimed emphatically, "There is no American Weill, there is no German Weill. There is only Weill." But LoveMusik fails to reconcile the many sides of Weill's God-given talent, throwing the show off-kilter. I'm among those who believe the pre-1935 phase of his collaboration with Brecht was never equaled in America. The gutter appeal of the urban masterpieces Mother Courage, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahoganny and The Threepenny Opera and their haunting songs of bitterness and yearning—"Surabaya Johnny," "Alabama Song"—are in startling, sometimes embarrassing contrast to the bouncy optimism and sentiment of the later, U.S.-era show tunes.
Compare this famous, insinuating Brecht lyric—
Oh, moon of Alabama
We now must say good-bye
We've lost our good old mamma
And must have whisky
Oh, you know why.
—with this, from Broadway with love and romance—
Paris oh Paris
Your riches embarrass
So Paris we're singing of you.
Weill worked with a string of leading American lyricists until his death in 1950. But which do you prefer—the Brecht/Weill "Mack the Knife," or the generic showbiz irony of "Wouldn't You Like to Be On Broadway?" (lyrics by Langston Hughes and Elmer Rice, no less)?
Wouldn't you like to be on Broadway
And go dancing at the Zanzibar
And have yourself an up-and-coming boyfriend
Who can make any course in par
Even Weill's superior ballads from the American years—"Speak Low," which promisingly opens LoveMusik (from One Touch of Venus, lyrics by Ogden Nash), and "September Song", which melodramatically signals the end the show (from Knickerbocker Holiday, lyrics by Maxwell Anderson)—scarcely compare to Weill's golden period with Brecht.
LoveMusik's Bertolt Brecht is played—a trifle overplayed—by David Pittu as a thieving, unwashed bully (which is probably on the money). Mr. Pittu's loathsome, misogynistic Brecht comes closest to a raw, not necessarily tuneful, Brechtian performance. The usually excellent Michael Cerveris underplays his wimpy Kurt Weill, as if on best behavior in a straitjacket. He enters the show as a chronically shy figure dressed like a Hasidic rabbi, and the next thing we know, he's being seduced by the voracious Lotte in an extremely small rowboat.
Ms. Murphy might be a pretty gamine in a light French farce. Her Lenya is all together too cute and too clean. Ms. Murphy revealed a natural flair for musical comedy in last season's revival of Wonderful Town, but she possesses no feel for Lotte Lenya the slag, nor for Lenya's low disdain for the world. Her admired performance sentimentalizes the legend. Her jokey notion of vulgarity is to talk out of the side of her mouth like a wisecracking New Yorker.
Ms. Murphy's assured technical perfection as a singer-performer is beyond question—but Lenya the natural-born actress-singer of the Brechtian school was unpolished, untrained and imperfect. Ms. Murphy captures the soprano-esque style of the young Lenya with a calculated, witty comment for the initiated—but not the battered soul of the woman she became.
The show's final number, following news of Weill's death, is almost inevitably the maudlin "September Song," and it's milked very nicely by the star, who's shrouded tearfully in a blanket. It's quite a performance. Donna Murphy's artistry belongs to Broadway; Lotte Lenya's to Brecht/Weill and Berlin.
I'M NOT SURE WHEN THE ROCK ARTIST known as Stew belongs. Neither is Stew. An acclaimed Los Angeles songwriter, singer, founder and leader of the jokily named band the Negro Problem, he's become a cult figure. Most artists don't want to remain a cult figure, but Stew does. Why he's now ventured into theater for the first time with Passing Strange at the Public downtown is a mystery. He's scarcely been to the theater. But we welcome Stew with open arms just the same. Theater needs him.
He doesn't look like one's idea of a fringe rocker: He's balding with glasses, a graying goatee and a girth. He's a tubby troubadour in his 40's—the exuberant narrator, performer, librettist, lyricist and co-composer (with bass player Heidi Rodewald) of his own hybrid show.
Passing Strange, directed by Annie Dorsen, who helped create it, has four terrific musicians and an equally talented troupe of singer-actors who perform the Stew saga. It's a coming-of-age story, as first plays tend to be: a portrait of a composer as a young man, and a naïve mini-odyssey that takes middle-class Stew's fictionalized self, named Youth, in a stoned haze to Amsterdam (70's psychedelic love-ins) and Berlin (ridiculous radical-art communes, more love-ins), and then home again, guiltily, to his mom's funeral in Los Angeles.
The surprising thing about Passing Strange is that there's nothing strange about it. Stew's tale is too familiar and retro (down to a lame satire of pretentious European art-house films). He's witty about racial stereotyping in the Berlin section (though the real world of race riots seems to have passed him by). His overlong narrative is a mess; Stew the librettist—as opposed to Stew the musician—needs help. He's created a show that swings wildly between street poetry and cliché, the banal and the hip. But what finally saves it and makes it appealing is the unlikely, affable presence of Stew himself at the center of it all, relating the story of his own wayward youth with a look of bemused tolerance and staggered disbelief.
There's no rock fury in him, yet he can erupt like a possessed revivalist converting the skeptical to his cause. As a composer-lyricist and an appealing, brilliant performer, the ballads he sings are melodic, sweet and beautiful. Passing Strange is a remarkable stage debut for Stew, despite the obvious flaws. His unexpected arrival at the Public gives exciting birth to a new musical voice in the theater. But where does he go from here?
(Source: The New York Observer | Arts & Culture | Kurt and Lotte: Brecht vs. Broadway in LoveMusik)
Want to watch "LoveMusik"? CHECK WHERE IT IS ON!!!
Or, BUY A CD OF THIS SHOW
.
No comments:
Post a Comment