An affair to remember

Michael Cerveris as Kurt Weill and Donna Murphy as Lotte Lenya in “Lovemusik,” the Harold Prince musical that pivots on Weill and Lenya’s complex relationship.

By Scott Harrah

“Lovemusik,” the new Broadway musical biography of composer Kurt Weill and his longtime lover Lotte Lenya, is in many ways akin to those breezy documentaries on dead celebrities like “Biography” or “The E True Hollywood Story.” It offers a semi-epic look at the composer’s life, but like the star-bio shows on TV, it is hard to decipher what’s fact and what’s speculation.

Alfred Uhry’s book is “suggested by the letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya,” so it is unclear if what is depicted here is 100% accurate. For example, German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht (played by David Pittu), one of Weill’s early collaborators, is almost portrayed as a villain.

What truly stands out is the incredible performance of Donna Murphy as Weill’s two-time wife Lenya, a former Viennese streetwalker and maid who eventually became the legendary composer’s muse. Singing in a thick German accent, Murphy is mesmerizing from scene to scene. Although Lenya was hardly a Teutonic star of Marlene Dietrich’s magnitude, she is best known in the States as the original Frau Schmidt in the Harold Prince-directed Broadway production of “Cabaret” (for which she received a Tony nomination). She was also a cabaret singer and worked briefly in Hollywood, starring in such films as the Tennessee Williams drama “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone” and the James Bond hit “From Russia With Love.”

Michael Cerveris is equally magnificent as Weill, portraying him as a shy, vulnerable man and a womanizer. Although Weill and Lenya were together for decades, neither was exactly faithful to the other, and the pain and heartache caused by their extramarital flings form the foundation for much of the story’s emotional intensity.

Uhry’s uneven book takes us from the day Weill met Lenya by a lake outside Berlin, to Hitler’s frightening rise to power and later to America, where Weill made a name for himself on Broadway and in Hollywood. Although it’s anyone’s guess if everything here actually happened, “Lovemusik” is still a marvelous forum for such classic Weill songs as “Speak Low” (featured brilliantly as the show’s opening number), “Mack the Knife” and “September Song.”

The first act is as suspenseful as any thriller about people trying to escape Nazi Germany. During the years of the Weimar Republic, Weill collaborates with Bertolt Brecht to create the world-famous classic “Threepenny Opera” starring Lenya. (Her name was somehow left out of the play’s program.) As anti-Semitism spreads throughout Germany, the Jewish Weill is forced to flee to Paris and leave his small fortune behind, along with Lenya. Since Jews were having their property and assets seized by the Nazis, Weill had to divorce Lenya and put their home and all his bank accounts in her name, but he remained in love with her.

Act two chronicles Weill and Lenya’s life in America after they remarry and become U.S. citizens. Included are numerous scenes that show how the couple begins splitting apart, and Murphy and Cerveris marvelously convey the tension between the two with their razor-sharp delivery of dialogue. After working on such successful Broadway musicals as “Knickerbocker Holiday” and “Lady in the Dark,” Weill spends much of his time in Los Angeles, leaving Lenya behind to fend for herself as she wonders exactly what he is doing with his time when he is not working on film scores. Harold Prince’s direction is not as tight in the second act, and some of the more serious scenes, such as Lenya’s reaction to Weill’s death, are awkward and border on the melodramatic. However, one overlooks such flaws because Murphy is emotionally arresting whenever she is on the stage, whether she’s talking or singing in Lenya’s heavily accented voice.

With a running time of nearly three hours, “Lovemusik” could easily be pared down to make the story more focused. For example, there is simply no need for such characters as Bertolt Brecht’s many women, most of whom do not even speak. Some of the most compelling scenes show Weill and Lenya reading aloud their letters to each other while they are on opposite coasts, and more of an emphasis on their famous love-hate relationship would have been far more interesting than scenes depicting Weill’s alleged hostilities with Brecht. As a biographical musical, however, “Lovemusik” is consistently entertaining, and Donna Murphy and Michael Cerveris have never been better, giving two of this season’s most incandescent performances on Broadway.