text: L_otte Lenya:_ four blunt syllables that connote not only an era but a style. Born Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blamauer in 1898, the working-class Viennese girl was reared as a Catholic but, in an effort to escape her alcoholic father’s abusive ways, made her early living as a whore. By the time she was fourteen, young Karoline was expert at becoming whoever her johns paid her to be. But she always kept her eyes on the stars: she dreamed of becoming a performer. To that end, she moved to Zurich, in 1914, where she studied classical movement and the Dalcroze method of dance—a bit of modern gymnastics whipped, like an egg, into the soufflé world of tutus.
  Determination marked her days. (“As soon as my feet hit the stage—I am safe,” she wrote.) Her will to be known was all-encompassing. By 1921, she was in Berlin, where she met her future collaborators: the Jewish composer Kurt Weill and the Marxist poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Unlike most flashy chorines, including her contemporary Marlene Dietrich, Lotte Lenya, as she now called herself, could not rely on simple prettiness to attract male attention. Instead, with her wide mouth and prominent teeth, the burgeoning performer acted her songs, projecting a kind of low-down, high-minded aesthetic: she was a girl of the streets who used her intelligence to stay afloat in an economically depressed country that was still recovering from one war while preparing for the next.
  In 1926, Lenya married Weill, whose interest in atonal syncopation and the rhythms of American jazz, as filtered through the work of the composer Arnold Schoenberg, had already inspired Berlin’s musical circles. But it was with Brecht that Weill first experienced wide-ranging success. Together, in 1928, the two men wrote “The Threepenny Opera,” the second of their three masterpieces about urban decay and the price the soul pays for living in the modern world. (The first was their 1927 Songspiel, “Mahagonny.”) No performer captured the cynical rot at the heart of the Brecht-Weill works better than Lenya. Untrained as a singer, she put the songs over by combining her knowledge of the world with the composers’.
  Any theatrical dramatization of Weill and Lenya’s marriage, such as “LoveMusik” (a Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Biltmore), should really be about two things: a performer’s allure and an artist’s thought process. Neither, however, is inherently dramatic, and Alfred Uhry, who wrote “LoveMusik,” and the legendary Harold Prince, who directed it, rely on a great deal of explication to get their points across. Employing techniques that Brecht made famous in his Epic Theatre—projecting slides that announce the setting for the action we are about to see, punctuating the drama with Weill’s songs—Prince clearly knows what he’s doing. But one can’t help feeling that, for the most part, he’s dressing up a turkey. “LoveMusik,” despite its great performers, great music, and great director, is pure packaging.
  It’s 1924. Lotte Lenya (Donna Murphy) is working as a maid at a lakeside house. She has been asked to pick up a young composer named Kurt Weill (Michael Cerveris), who is waiting at the jetty. Dressed in rabbinical-looking clothes—dark hat, dark suit—the bespectacled Weill is all fumbling hesitation, while Lenya, in a light-colored dress, is all legs and suggestion. (Before the trip across the lake is over, Lenya has shown Weill some of her hidden talents.) By drawing such marked contrasts between his characters, Prince means to illustrate their differences: Lenya is nature; Weill is mind. But, as even the most cursory reading of “Speak Low (When You Speak Love)”—the 1996 collection of the Weill-Lenya letters on which Uhry, in part, relied for his script—makes clear, the composer was not particularly modest; he was a “naturist,” or occasional nudist. Evidently, Prince and Uhry, who make the same reductive distinctions—between the liberated and the repressed, the lighthearted and the gloomy, the free-spirited and the cerebral—throughout the show, believe that the subtlety and intelligence that the real Weill and Lenya brought to their work wouldn’t fly on Broadway, would be deemed too “European.”
  After the success of “The Threepenny Opera,” Weill and Lenya escape the rapidly approaching war by moving to the New World. In New York, Weill becomes a theatrical composer of note, while Lenya’s career goes into something of a decline. (She gets work in a cabaret, but largely because she sings Weill’s songs.) And even though we’re an hour and a half into a two-hour-and-forty-minute production, we can’t help thinking that the play could have begun here, with the drama of the two formidable Teutonic artists struggling to find their way amid the glaring billboards and the American penchant to please. From time to time, Brecht (the ferociously energetic David Pittu) becomes involved in the action, but he’s mostly just a punch line: a loud, sweaty German who gets on the Weills’ nerves, first in Berlin, and then in America, where he refuses to change his cagey, nasty ways. This is precisely the kind of xenophobia that makes seeing “LoveMusik” a disquieting experience—and a telling one. For instance, while American audiences embraced Marlene Dietrich, they had a harder time with Lenya. Dietrich played the exotic to the hilt, whereas Lenya was simply herself—which meant that she was not always appealing. (In later years, she had her biggest movie success as a villainous Russian secret agent in the 1963 James Bond caper “From Russia with Love.”) This is not explained in the show, but Murphy should be familiar with her character’s context. Instead, she tries to be adorable, to charm the audience. She desperately wants to be liked as a performer, and she can’t quite grasp a character who doesn’t project an atmosphere of health and good will. Lenya understood that, while looks fade, style doesn’t. Murphy doesn’t get any of Lenya’s physical attributes right, either. She speaks with her lips pursed, and when she wants to convey Lenya’s careless attitude she simply slouches or slows down. The real Lenya, singing Brecht’s lyrics with her sad trumpet of a voice, knew how to show us how life had beaten her up.
  Michael Cerveris is equally miscast. He’s too powerful for the part of Weill, a retiring man who worked and smoked his way to an early grave. (He died of a heart attack at the age of fifty, in 1950.) Watching Cerveris trying to hold himself back in the role is like watching a Great Dane trying to hide in a corner. Like Murphy, Cerveris makes sure to give his “W”s a “V” sound, lest we forget that he’s German, but in him the effect is even odder—like an American doughboy imitating the “Krauts” at a bond rally.
  In the nineteen-forties, Lenya became friends with the brilliant American magazine editor George Davis (played by John Scherer, who’s too butch by half). A drinker and a homosexual, Davis took it upon himself to resuscitate Lenya’s career (and, later, to marry her). After Weill’s death, Lenya went on to star in an Off Broadway revival of “The Threepenny Opera,” and to make a number of definitive recordings of his work. Murphy plays Lenya’s grief as she plays most of the part: by rote, and with no discernible understanding of the emotional complexity that ran through the real woman’s performances. (A valuable record of Lenya’s work is G. W. Pabst’s gritty 1931 film version of “Threepenny.” She burns a hole in the screen with her depression and her disdain for herself and others.) Sitting on the edge of the stage, wrapped in a schmatte, Murphy’s Lenya delivers a lovely but shallow rendition of “September Song,” to express her sense of loss over Weill’s passing, but she never manages to make it matter to us. As she finishes the song, and Davis hustles her onstage for the “Threepenny” revival—the scene that draws this show to a close—we sit in a kind of funk, imagining what “LoveMusik” might have been. The show as it is seems to have been inspired less by what Lenya and Weill had to say about their world than by Mel Brooks’s “Springtime for Hitler.” ♦
  Published in the print edition of the May 14, 2007, issue.
  Hilton Als, a staff writer at The New Yorker, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He, most recently, published, “My Pinup,” in November, 2022.
  More:Manhattan Theatre ClubMarriagesWeill, Kurt
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