Cabaret master opens new world
Kurt Weill’s music can be angular, political or heartbreaking. It’s sophisticated, tinged with the desperate gaiety of Berlin between the world wars. A group of Theatre students has just had an education in the art of revue, thanks to Nancy Helms, who teaches the history of musical theatre.
Helms is the director of a student revue called From Berlin to Broadway, which opens Feb. 8 and runs for two weeks in the Cazalet on the Loyola Campus.
The show uses an ocean liner as the motif to link the songs, which spans Weill’s musical life from the Weimar Republic of Germany to the Great White Way. Even the lobby of the Cazalet Theatre will be used to provide an introduction to this trans-Atlantic musical voyage.
Although he was one of the most successful composers in Germany and was married to Lotte Lenya, the most popular musical star, Weill, a Jew, had to escape the Nazis in 1935 to reestablish his career in the United States. Even after creating many productions that won critical acclaim, his contribution to musical theatre was not fully appreciated until after his death.
Weill is not for the uninitiated, Helms said. “We cast the show last April. Then we worked together and individually over the fall term, preparing the music and creating the back stories [context of the songs], to be ready for an intensive week in December with the orchestra.
In Europe, Weill (1900-1950) had trained to become a classical composer. When he got to the United States, he tried to create a new American opera on Broadway. He said, “The Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny were stepping-stones towards my idea of musical theatre that would totally integrate drama and music, spoken word, song and movement.”
He worked with the best lyricists, from his first cabaret roots with political activist Berthold Brecht in Europe to Ira Gershwin in New York.
For more information about the production, go to news.concordia.ca