DVDs: Pirate Jenny
Although the music of Kurt Weill has, in recent years, boasted such notable interpreters as Teresa Stratas and Ute Lemper, one performer will forever be associated with Weill, as well as with the texts of Bertolt Brecht. That performer is Lotte Lenya 1900-1981, and that's hardly surprising. She was married to Weill, and created leading roles in such Brecht-Weill pieces as The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny, and The Seven Deadly Sins.
Lenya preserved her Threepenny Opera performance in the 1931 German film version. In the U.S., her performance as Jenny in the landmark 1954 off-Broadway revival of The Threepenny Opera established that work in the English-speaking world. And Lenya kept alive the flame of her husband's work by continuing to record his songs and perform them in concert.
A recently released DVD devoted to the theater songs of Weill and Brecht includes a lovely, if too brief, treat, a twenty-five minute, black-and-white TV concert with Lenya, taken from a 1958 episode of CBS-TV's Camera Three series. With James MacAndrew the host and occasional translator, Lenya sings five Brecht-Weill theatre songs, three in German "Surabaya Johnny," "Bilbao Song," "Ballad of the Drowned Girl" and two in English "Alabama Song," which was written in English, and "Pirate Jenny". During the opening number, she roams down the aisle of a deserted theatre, then performs the rest of the program on a stage featuring a bar setting.
The highlight: Lenya's big number from the still-running off-Broadway Threepenny Opera, "Pirate Jenny," performed in that production's Marc Blitzstein translation. It's a mesmerizing account, offering evidence of how remarkable she must have been in that production just a few years earlier.
After the Lenya set, the DVD continues with two color programs, both presumably from Camera Three and from 1972, devoted to the work of Brecht and featuring another distinguished interpreter of this material, German actress-singer Gisela May. Opening with an arresting "Moritat" "Mack the Knife", May sings most of the same numbers that Lenya performed, mostly in German, with occasional subtitles or English-language introductions. There's a Brecht-Weill rarity, "In Potsdam Under the Oak Trees," and the non-Weill material includes songs from Mother Courage and The Good Woman of Setzuan.
The final segment of the DVD offers yet another notable Weill interpreter, Viennese-American Martha Schlamme, whose career included a Broadway appearance as Golde in the original Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof. She sings "Bilbao," then, in an earlier, black-and-white clip, a number Threepenny's "Tango Ballad" with Will Holt, an excerpt from their 1963 off-Broadway show A Kurt Weill Cabaret.
THE MEDIUM VAI
The late '40s and '50s were a time of experimentation in the field of Broadway opera that included such works as Street Scene, Regina, The Golden Apple, and The Most Happy Fella. And then there were the acclaimed Broadway productions of operas by Gian Carlo Menotti, which included The Consul 1950 and The Saint of Bleecker Street 1954.
The first of Menotti's Broadway successes was a double bill of The Telephone, a lightweight, half-hour curtain raiser, with the more substantial The Medium. Opening at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on May 1, 1947, the combination of The Medium and The Telephone played 211 performances, a remarkable run for a pair of new American operas. Equally remarkable was the fact that the music, lyrics, book, and direction for the pieces were all the work of Menotti.
Menotti saw The Medium as a parable about the conflict between faith and cynicism, but it was also a ghost story, a horror story, and a highly theatrical melodrama. The work's six characters are Mme. Flora, a phony spiritualist; Monica, her daughter; Toby, the mute gypsy boy who, like Monica, is an accomplice during Mme. Flora's rigged seances; and three of Mme. Flora's sadly gullible clients, visiting the medium to make contact with their dead children.
Set somewhere in Europe, The Medium demonstrates how this fake becomes a victim of her own deceptions. During one of her fraudulent seances, Flora feels the touch of fingers around her throat, and later hears voices. Is this Flora's imagination, the supernatural, or the work of Toby? The piece ends in violence and tragedy, but the question remains unanswered.
In addition to its terrific release on DVD of a rare tape of The Consul, VAI has previously issued on DVD the 1951 film version of The Medium, indispensable as it preserves the performance of Marie Powers, who created the role of Flora on Broadway. The film also features the Monica of a young Anna Maria Alberghetti.
VAI's latest release of The Medium offers a one-hour Canadian television version from 1978, based on a 1974 Comus Music Theatre of Canada stage production, directed by Michael Bawtree. All of the principals do well, but the tape's chief attraction is its Mme. Flora, distinguished Canadian contralto Maureen Forrester. Flora is a scenery-chewing, tour-de-force role, and Forrester's grotesque, intense, and imposing Flora is a powerful performance.
The Medium is still performed around the world, and VAI's DVDs of the film and the TV production are both recommended.