Beauty in Sound

By T. E. Kalem

BERLIN TO BROADWAY WITH KURT WEILL

This show is an auditory feast, but everything except the music leaves something to be desired. Kurt Weill's theater music is one of the glories of the modern stage--haunting, melodious, perfectly wedded to the lyrics. Such songs as Pirate Jenny, Alabama Song, My Ship and Lost in the Stars do more than fill an audience with pleasure. They are incarnations of beauty in sound.

The irritating thing is that the devisers of this production do not leave Weill enough alone. Arbitrarily, the show has a shipboard setting, and a tedious commentator. Donald Saddler has staged the numbers as if they were supper-club turns. The cast has fine voices, but the collective air of bouncy innocence somehow belies what is worldly, skeptical and melancholy in Weill's mental tone. This is Weill without tears, and it misses the distilled suffering that makes some of his music so affecting.

One exception must be made. Margery Cohen bears witness to life's bruises, and in the style of Lotte Lenya and Elly Stone, her voice contains pain, endures it, survives it.

While the Berlin section of the evening is less well done, it is more meaningful because Weill's collaborator was Bertolt Brecht. Between them they fashioned a dramatic rhetoric of music and lyrics that moved with deceptive ease from the beat of the goose step to the glide of the tango. Decadence was their target, but they were half in love with what they hated; Weill could decant sin from a saxophone. The music that he later composed in the U.S. somehow lacks that moral bite that Brecht inspired.

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