Of all the great musical composers of the 20th Century, few have proved as difficult to classify as Kurt Weill, who died in April 1950, barely having reached his 50th birthday.
While the Wunderkind from 1920s Germany wrote an opera (“Marie Galante”), two symphonies, a violin concerto and chamber works, he may be best remembered for his politicized collaborations with the great playwright Bertolt Brecht — darkly satirical shows like “The Threepenny Opera” and “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.” Others revere Weill for his anti-totalitarian stance (his Jewish heritage and well-known hatred for Hitler’s regime forced him to flee to Paris with his wife, Lotte Lenya, when the Nazis took control in his native Germany).
But if most people still associate his music with dark cabarets and rasping Teutonic chanteuses sharing the pain of lost love, Weill’s song “Mack the Knife” still proved melodic enough to become a pop hit two different times in the 1950s — first for Louis Armstrong, then for Bobby Darin. Even The Doors recorded a version of Weill’s “Alabama Song.”
The apparent pliability of Weill’s music really should not be surprising: Once he found himself a political exile in New York in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Weill deftly reinvented himself as a composer of Broadway musicals amid the likes of Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers.
Most of the shows Weill wrote for Broadway are rarely seen these days (although there have been two recent British revivals of “Lady in the Dark” and “Love Life”). But in collaboration with Pegasus Players, the Evanston-based Light Opera Works is reviving “One Touch of Venus,” a musical tale from 1943 about a barber who places a ring on the finger of a statue of Venus, which promptly comes to life and falls in love with him. Opening night is Saturday at Northwestern University’s Cahn Auditorium.
“Weill is really a unique case,” says Light Opera Works artistic director Philip Kraus. “He was one of the first composers of American musicals who came from a totally serious musical background; his Broadway pieces demonstrate Weill’s mastery of popular American song, coupled with the structural integrity and harmonic vocabulary of a German expressionistic composer.”
So why do we not see “One Touch of Venus” or “Knickerbocker Holiday” revived as regularly as “Oklahoma!” or “Carousel,” especially when Weill’s assorted collaborators included such literary giants as Ogden Nash, Maxwell Anderson, S.J. Perelman and Ira Gershwin?
In the first place, all of Weill’s Broadway shows are expensive, demanding massive casts and full orchestras (both of which Chicago’s professional musical houses generally try to avoid). “One Touch of Venus” requires two ballet sequences and singers adroit with complicated music. Some of Weill’s shows have what Kraus euphemistically refers to as “book problems” (translation: the melodies are great but the narrative may be boring, dated, ridiculous or all three). And then there is Weill’s celebrated cynical edge.
Even though there is a wacky absurdism to a comic piece like “One Touch of Venus” (which was inspired by the Pygmalion legend and originally starred Mary Martin), there are no sing-along cowboys warbling about American individualism in this or any other Weill musical.
“Commercial producers,” says Kraus, “just won’t touch Weill material. And that’s one of the reasons we have undertaken to do a series of his musicals.”
“Everything that Weill wrote in America broke the mold of what had been done before,” says Jonathan Eaton, a Cincinnati-based director who has directed several Weill works with major opera companies in Britain and America and also conceived a Weill revue that premiered last year at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.
“Each Broadway musical was a stylistic and structural revolution,” Eaton says. “That perhaps explains why most of them did not do so well at the time.”
Even director J.R. Sullivan (one of Chicago’s busiest free-lancers) confesses that he did not know “One Touch of Venus” before he was hired to direct this upcoming production. But after reading the script and hearing a tape, he says he was hooked.
“Many people have never had the chance to see this show before,” Sullivan says, arguing that there is nothing wrong with the “One Touch of Venus” libretto. “The book balances with the music in this piece in a really extraordinary way. The acting and the telling of the story are just as important as the singing. So this needs a company at the top of its game.”
By blending the acting traditions of Pegasus with the strong voices that are long a feature of Light Opera Works cast, Sullivan hopes he’ll have the combined resources necessary to master the extensive demands of a Weill musical (Pegasus and Light Opera Works have not collaborated since their 1995 co-production of “The Golden Apple”).
“Weill’s music is an extraordinary mixture of muscle and heart,” Eaton says, delighted to hear that someone, somewhere is again tackling “One Touch of Venus.”
“The music from many Broadway shows is all sweetness and thus fades away quickly,” he adds. “But Weill’s stuff always has plenty of vinegar delivered in a seductive waltz. That’s why his music will always survive.”
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“One Touch of Venus” plays Saturday, Sunday and Aug. 22-24 at Cahn Auditorium, 600 Emerson St., Evanston. Tickets are $21-$48. (Tickets for those under 21 are half price.) For tickets, times and more information, call 847-869-6300.
