Kurt Weill In America

Kurt Weill is pretty hot for a dead guy right now. He just got his own jukebox musical on Broadway and the reviews are much better than, say, Bob Dylan's were last fall. Still, most of his works after he fled Nazi Germany are still not well known. A new recording from the 92nd Street Y Lyrics and Lyricists concert series spotlights many of these lesser known works.

Unlike former partner Bertoldt Brecht, who put his stock in becoming a political activist after he arrived in America, Weill became a journeyman composer who worked with some of the biggest names in New York at the time, from Ira Gershwin to Ogden Nash. That his musicals have been forgotten now doesn't make their original songs less remarkable, from the gentle shift that turns a love song atonal in the "Street Scene Suite," written with Langston Hughes, to the swinging sass of "Buddy on the Nightshift", with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. At worst, the songs could be easily slotted in to any musical playing right now; at best they ought to become, like "Mack the Knife," top-chart standards.