All the Weill

Foothills faces a challenging revue with courage and triumphs

by Steve Vineberg

BERLIN TO BROADWAY WITH KURT WEILL Music by Kurt Weill. Lyrics by assorted writers. Text and format by Gene Lerner. Directed by Barry Ivan. Musical direction by Steven Bergman. Set designed by Laura Sasso. Costumes by Ted Giammona. Lighting by Anne Marie Duggan. With Robin V. Allison, Cristin J. Hubbard, Chip Phillips, Mark Merchant, and Roger Anderson. At Worcester Foothills Theatre, through May 3.

Among the music written for the stage in our century, Kurt Weill's may be the most eerily, mysteriously beautiful and the most difficult to categorize. Weill's career wasn't terribly long -- The Threepenny Opera, the first and most celebrated of his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, premiered in 1928, and he was dead by 1950. But his music underwent so many phases and alterations that, listening to one of his Berlin kabarett numbers or one of the wistful, almost childlike ballads from his 1934 Marie Galante (performed in Paris after Weill and his wife, Lotte Lenya, the original Jenny of The Threepenny Opera, fled the Nazis,) you can scarcely believe that, only a few years later, he'd be writing Broadway shows such as Lady in the Dark (with Ira Gershwin) or One Touch of Venus (with S.J. Perelman and Ogden Nash).

I admit to being in thrall to Weill's music, so the revue Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill, currently in a long overdue revival at Foothills, is my idea of a sweet two hours' diversion. I won't pretend the production is ideal. The staging by Barry Ivan is adequate at best, clumsy and indecipherable at worst -- as in the "Tango Ballad" from Threepenny, where the erotic posturings of one singing and one dancing couple defy interpretation and where Mark Merchant, stripped to the waist by his paramour (Cristin J. Hubbard), reveals a wire running all the way down his spine to a battery pack concealed below his belt.

Often the choreography doesn't match the lyrics, and though costumer Ted Giammona has designed well for the actors -- particularly the two women -- his costumes are sometimes in tension with the text. Hubbard and Robin V. Allison in glitzy evening gowns seem so incongruous singing "Ain't It Awful, the Heat?" the opening number from Weill and Langston Hughes's magnificent tenement-set operetta Street Scene, that all they can do is play it like slumming Park Avenue debs. And the wartime flavor of "Speak Low" from the 1943 One Touch of Venus, underscored by a time-is-fleeting Ogden Nash lyric and pointed up by the narration Gene Lerner wrote for the revue, is undercut when the men (Merchant and Chip Phillips) appear in tuxedos rather than khaki. (This was the most memorable number in the original 1972 production, which premiered in Boston.)

But the visual inconsistencies of the Foothills production don't mitigate its aural pleasures. (Steven Bergman directed the Newton Wayland arrangements and plays piano in the show's alert, intimate band.) All five members of the cast -- the fifth, Roger Anderson, narrates and is an occasional addition to the musical ensemble -- are distinctive performers in good voice who do justice to Weill's wonderful and often difficult music. This Berlin to Broadway has many highlights, including Hubbard's renditions of the jagged, vengeful "Pirate Jenny" (from Threepenny) and the playful "That's Him" (from Venus), in which she manages to embody a distinctly '40s brand of sexual glamour.

Hubbard shapes these performances with admirable precision; so does Allison in her attack on "Surabaya Johnny" from the Weill-Brecht Happy End (perhaps the most stunning of the scores they produced together). "Surabaya Johnny," the tale of a young woman deserted by her brutal seaman lover, is a gorgeous melodrama of a ballad, and Allison is smart enough not to skirt its high emotion.

Merchant and Phillips hit just the right combination of beery nostalgia, self-mockery, and genuine stirred feeling in the "Bilbao Song" (also from Happy End), where two buddies reminisce about the long-gone saloon of their youth and try to recall the words to an ancient song thrashing around in their heads. Phillips, whose silvery beard gives him the touching, slightly gone-to-seed look of an aging roué, is terrific throughout, but when he sits quite still and sings "September Song" (from Knickerbocker Holiday, one of Weill's first American scores), with great simplicity that puts the emotion of the Maxwell Anderson lyric front and center, he approaches the sublime.

One of my frequent complaints about Foothills is its play selection. The company often plays it safe and bland. But no one in his right mind could call Kurt Weill's music bland, and even with a handful of familiar tunes such as "September Song" and "Mack the Knife," most of the songs in Berlin to Broadway are too complex, musically and emotionally, to soothe the ears of subscriber audiences. The deficiencies of Ivan's production aside, I commend Foothills for staging a revue as challenging as this one and for giving five talented singers the opportunity to get on top of some of the best music ever written for the theater.

Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill runs through April 26. Tickets are $15 to $23.