Nearly everybody knows that Kurt Weill's last name is pronounced vial -- nearly everyone except Weill himself. He pronounced it with a W -- after he came to America, that is. In 1935 he decided never again to speak German. He put aside the Deutsche where w's are pronounced as v's, and he told people his name was wile. Similarly, he abandoned the German music hall idiom that made him famous and started composing in a Broadway style. Instead of the urgency of "Mack the Knife" we begin to hear the melodious "September Song" and "Speak Low." After he died of a heart attack at age 50 in 1950 -- yes, this is his centennial year -- music historians neatly divided his career into two parts, the serious German and the pop American.
Andrea Marcovicci premiered a program of Weill songs for his centennial and says: "I'm too happy a person to sing that German stuff." The charismatic singer-actress speaks colorfully and bluntly, to make a point. A black and white division between two halves is, of course, an oversimplification. His widow, Lotte Lenya, has said there was "only one Weill." On the other hand, you could argue the opposite -- that there were many Weills -- when you consider the symphonies and operas he wrote before switching gears and collaborating with Bertolt Brecht on Threepenny Opera, Happy End and Mahagonny. And the lovely French chansons he wrote during two years in Paris. Americans got to know Weill with a "W" when his Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus had long runs on Broadway. Love Life, written by Weill with Alan Jay Lerner in 1948, closed quickly and was never recorded because of a musicians union strike, but its pop songs were frequently sung by crooners on radio in my youth. In his late 40s, Weill began to stretch again. He composed the Broadway opera Street Scene, then a folk opera for young singers, Down in the Valley, and a music drama about apartheid, Lost In The Stars. Weill was writing a musical comedy version of Huckleberry Finn when he died unexpectedly of a heart attack on April 3, 1950.
So, clearly, there are different facets to Weill's writing. Marcovicci has studied all of them and this multi-talented performer developed a program of Weill's American songs on commission from the New York Philharmonic in March 2000 and repeated it at Philadelphia's Prince Music Theater in September. She says that the German sturm und drang doesn't appeal to her. "I have issues with Brecht. He hated women. It shows in his lyrics and even in his personal life. As a feminist, I don't play women who put up with men who abuse them -- `Oh, I love him because he hit me.' As far as I'm concerned, Surabaya Johnny can keep that damn pipe in his mouth and go surabay someone else!" (She refers to the lyrics of "Surabaya Johnny," the 1929 song about an abusive relationship, where the singer keeps begging Johnny to "take that damn pipe out of your mouth" while she admits that she still loves him so.)
"I'm too happy to sing that stuff now," Andrea says in September of 2000. "I would have loved songs like that when I was young and suicidal." She's been married seven years and has a five-year-old daughter, Alice. "I'm happier now than I've ever been. I'm so lucky that I receive so much love. That's what allows me to go out on stage and share love with the audience."
Marcovicci argues with Lenya's assertion that there's only one Weill. "You can hear a definite change when he wrote for Broadway," says Andrea. "He wanted to be popular here. He said he'd rather hear a cab driver whistling his song than win a Pulitzer Prize. He stopped speaking German and used only English. And he wrote in the American popular idiom. His American music has a happier sound than his German music."
Marcovicci feels that Weill was changed, also, by the realization that the Nazis were murdering his people. It brought an enriched compassion and humanity into his music. Weill had been a non-practicing Jew. But then his parents and his sister and her husband had to flee from Germany to Palestine while he was writing The Eternal Road. He wrote a Kiddush for synagogue worship and dedicated it to his father. And he wrote music for a number of inspirational pageants and radio programs to draw attention to the plight of Europe's Jews: "We Will Never Die," "The Jew in War," "Remember Us" -- about those who died in the concentration camps -- and more.
Marcovicci believes that Weill was a real rival of R&H when he died prematurely. She also compares his work to George Gershwin. Certainly his Street Scene had similarities with Porgy and Bess. Marcovicci points out moments where Weill seems to bridge the sounds of Gershwin and Bernstein.
As she does with all her shows, Marcovicci has researched Weill's life and gives her audiences biographical information and personal anecdotes, along with her own reaction to the songs. For example, she ridicules the lyrics of "The Right Guy For Me" which were written for a Sylvia Sidney-George Raft movie, but she sings the song because Weill's melody is so beautiful. She uses her expressive and pliable voice to link songs that have similarities -- such as "Mon Ami My Friend" from Johnny Johnson and "September Song" from Knickerbocker Holiday, which have a similar musical pattern. She also unearths little-known pieces like "This Time Next Year" from the uncompleted Huckleberry Finn and the haunting "The River Is So Blue" from an unproduced late-1930s movie. Marcovicci's musical director and pianist is Shelly Markham.
Andrea feels that Weill's most romantic piece was the 1943 One Touch Of Venus. "It was written for Marlene Dietrich but she rejected it as too sexy. Can you believe that, from Dietrich?" The sensuous Ava Gardner, of course, played the part on film, and Marcovicci loves to show audiences her impression of Gardner seductively sprawling on a bed. "Don't all you ladies sometimes do that for the man in your life? Oh, come on, yes you do. I know I do." Marcovicci's presentation includes a big chunk of this show and a similarly large selection from Lady in the Dark.
While eschewing the German part of Weill's career, Marcovicci recommends that music-lovers listen to other singers who do those songs well. "Listen to Ute Lemper," she says. "She trills her r's like Eartha Kitt on speed." And she praises her friend Helen Schneider who has had a big career in Germany doing Weill's German and American songs. [See a separate story about Schneider and Weill in TotalTheater's Periodica section. Also see a story about Weill and conductor Maurice Levine in Periodica.]
Andrea Marcovicci is the daughter of a New York physician who fathered her when he was 63 years old, and a 29-year-old mother who was -- and still is -- a singer. She treasures the great relationship that she had with them, and advises other older fathers that they have nothing to fear. She herself never married til she was past 40, to actor Daniel Reichert, and they had a daughter, Alice, in 1995. She began her career as an actress and was on the daytime television series Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing. She made her Broadway debut in the musical adaptation of Henry James' Ambassador (1971). Among her non-musical theater achievements are Ophelia to Sam Waterston's Hamlet for Joseph Papp's Shakespeare in the Park (1976) and lead roles in Saint Joan (1989) and Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (1991.)
She began to sing cabaret in 1985 at the Gardenia Restaurant in Los Angeles. "I'm basically a torch singer. Singing about love. Losing it, then mourning it endlessly." But also, sometimes, about finding it.
Listen to "This Is What I Dreamed" on her What's Love CD. She explains her approach: "I start with the lyrics. Jazz comes from the music first and jazz vocalists sometimes distort the words in their attempt to develop the musical side of a song. That's fine; I understand it and enjoy it, but it's not my metier. The music that I choose to perform requires an actress for its delivery because the songs have powerful lyrics and deep emotions. I wouldn't be as emotional a singer without having been an actress."
Her cabaret appearances are marked by the intimate way she educates the audience about the careers of such figures as Ruth Etting, Mabel Mercer and Kurt Weill. At the same time, seeing Andrea in a club is like visiting an old friend in her living room. She envelopes every one in the audience in her warmth. Her voice has, as Peter Hepple wrote, "supreme tenderness, a thrillingly controlled vibrato, marvelous diction and phrasing that can only come from a skilled actress." She says "the real art of the cabaret performer lies in the juxtaposition of songs, putting two or three songs together in such a way that new and deeper meanings come to light, the resonance of one song lingering to change the color of the next."
Of her many cabaret recordings, Andrea is particularly proud of "New Words" (1994) where she sang 21 songs by contemporary composers such as Maury Yeston, William Finn, Ricky Ian Gorden, Stephen Schwartz, Craig Carnelia, John Bucchino and Glenn Mehrbach. The Finn selection is notable because it's an early version of "The Music Still Plays On" which he used, with changes, in his 1998 musical A New Brain.
Marcovicci's movie career includes The Front opposite Woody Allen (1976) and Henry Jaglom's Someone to Love (1985) opposite Orson Welles in his last film appearance. In 1996 she debuted the song cycle I Am Anne Frank at Lincoln Center with the American Symphony Orchestra, and she appears with other symphony orchestras in concert. Although she has not been in a Broadway musical since Ambassador, she starred in the Reprise production of Finian's Rainbow in Los Angeles in 1993 and 42nd Street Moon's production of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever in San Francisco in 1999.
Marcovicci will star in the Prince Theater's revival of Weill's Lady in the Dark in September, 2001, in Philadelphia. Written before Rodgers & Hammerstein's first show, Lady in the Dark pioneered in an area that R&H usually get credited for -- the use of ballet and dream sequences to explain the psychology of the characters and to further the plot. Lady's/> theme is the disparity between Liza Elliott's real and dream worlds. Decades before Sondheim did something similar in Company, Lady in the Dark takes a close look at its protagonist at a crucial moment in her life and shows what's going on in her mind.
The original production starred Gertrude Lawrence and featured Danny Kaye, Victor Mature and Macdonald Carey. It hasn't had a major revival since the 1941 original, although I saw a staging at the Valley Forge and Westbury Music Fairs and a production at LaSalle College Summer Music Theater. To succeed, it needs an intelligent, insightful actress who, hopefully, has a better voice than Lawrence's. Marcovicci seems to be an ideal choice.
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