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[Theater reviews]

Song spiel
From Brecht to Broadway with Weill

BY CAROLYN CLAY

Kurt Weill: Songs Degenerate and Otherwise
An evening with Alvin Epstein and Beth Anne Cole. Music by Kurt Weill. Lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, Bertolt Brecht, Elmer Rice, Langston Hughes, Ogden Nash, Paul Green, Georg Kaiser, and Ira Gershwin. Musical direction and arrangements by Cathy Rand. Lighting by Caleb Wertenbaker. At the Market Theater through July 1.

The Nazis were no pot calling a kettle black. Rather, they blanketed art ranging from Klee and Chagall to Bartók and Webern as “degenerate” — a term way too good for Hitler and his cronies themselves. Hence the title of Alvin Epstein and Beth Anne Cole’s bristling evocation of the śuvre of Kurt Weill, who made it into the proud ranks of the “entartete Kunst” (“degenerate art”) before fleeing Germany, first to Paris and then to America, in the 1930s.

Epstein and Cole step deftly back and forth between Weill’s tougher, jumpier German songs and the wryer, more romantic tunes he wrote for Broadway. According to Epstein’s program note, the pair “have set ‘Mack the Knife’ and ‘Lily from Hell’ next to ‘Speak Low’ and ‘September Song’ to illuminate the genius of Weill’s two distinct careers.” Indeed, both sides of a shining coin (though the German songs are better) are represented in this two-hour, two-act program that’s as de-lovely as it is, in its astringent Nazi-irking way, degenerate.

The 75-year-old Epstein’s a wonder: never a Pavarotti of either larynx or girth, he nonetheless possesses a trained voice, a tongue that can dart through diction (English or German) with D’Oyly Carte precision, and acting chops honed over five decades, the last two at the American Repertory Theatre. Cole is half his age, with twice his singing talent. But both singers communicate the ache and the spark, the world-weariness and the hard-bittenness of much of the material. And if Epstein makes Weill seem likely fodder for an elder pixie, the Canadian-born, London-trained Cole proves that, gravel-larynxed Lotte Lenya notwithstanding, Weill’s music responds to vocal as well as stylistic riches.

The staging of Kurt Weill is simplicity itself: a couple of stools, a couple of mikes, and music director/accompanist Cathy Rand at the piano being unobtrusively excellent. Epstein wears a pullover, Cole a black cocktail dress tarted up by red shoes. Out of the gun, the euphonious “September Song,” from the 1938 Knickerbocker Holiday (after Johnny Johnson Weill’s first Broadway show), is kicked in the butt by the decade-earlier Threepenny Opera’s “Ballad of Sexual Slavery,” to which Epstein and Cole bring a genuine, guttural contempt. Over and over, often in a single number, Weill’s restless rhythms are juxtaposed with his ravishing melody lines. Spitting out the doleful “Sailor’s Tango,” from 1929’s Happy End, Epstein suddenly surprises with the melting reprise “The sea is blue, so blue,” bringing home both the danger and the seduction of the ocean. Ditto, war. Ditto, sex.

The expansive program includes several unsung — well, not very often sung — gems, including 1935’s terrific “Nana Song,” with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, and several ditties from the 1943 One Touch of Venus, with lyrics by Ogden Nash. Everyone knows “Speak Low,” which is rendered here as a quietly intense duet, but how about the whimsical “How Much Do I Love You?”, with its ultimate hyperbole of passion: “As a dachshund abhors/Revolving doors.” Contrast that cute, crooning duet with “The Life That We Lead,” from Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, an early Brecht/Weill collaboration. Here Cole and Epstein advance on each other like lovers/combatants squaring off to a slinky melody, assuring each other of what not to count on.

Epstein can do jaunty (“Wouldn’t You Like To Be on Broadway?”, from Street Scene), but he emphasizes the scariness, not the insipid Bobby Darin sexiness, of “Mack the Knife” (part of which he sings in German). With Cole he delivers an audaciously discordant, dead-eyed “Moon of Alabama.” And Cole, for her part, takes that familiar standard “Pirate Jenny” and acts it to a chilling fare-thee-well.

If you sing this great theater music for me and plunge some Macheath-worthy teeth into it, I’ll have few complaints. But if at the apparent conclusion of this evening I had a gripe, it would have been that my favorite songs from Happy End had failed to put in an appearance. Not to worry, they proved the encores, Cole suffusing “Surabaya Johnny” with disarming anger and pain and Epstein invoking the beloved and seedy Bill’s Beer Hall of “The Bilbao Song. ” As he sings of said edifice and I feel about a brimming dose of Weill: “It was fantastic/Beyond belief.”

Issue Date: June 28- July 5, 2001