‘Love Life’ Off Broadway Review: Or, Why Kurt Weill Got Lost in America

A lost musical deserves another listen, if not another look The post ‘Love Life’ Off Broadway Review: Or, Why Kurt Weill Got Lost in America appeared first on TheWrap.

Mar 28, 2025 - 15:03

Here’s the good news, if a bit late: Back in 1948, Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner wrote a truly great score for “Love Life,” the only musical they made together. If you haven’t heard of “Love Life,” it’s because the show ran only 252 performances and was never recorded. The Encores! series has brought it back to Gotham for the first time, where that revival opened Wednesday at the New York City Center.

Earlier this year, U.K.’s Opera North revived “Love Life,” and there was a German-translation production in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, in 2017. Otherwise, these three revivals are it for Weill and Lerner’s only musical.

Why? Lerner, who also gave us “My Fair Lady and “Camelot” with Frederick Loewe, wrote an adventurous but deeply flawed book for “Love Life.” Taking way too many pages from “The Skin of Our Teeth” by Thornton Wilder, “Love Life” tells the story of a troubled marriage that unravels between the years 1791 and 1948. The couple (Brian Stokes Mitchell and Kate Baldwin) and their two young children (Christopher Jordan and Andrea Rosa Guzman), however, never age. The husband-father changes his job a lot, and the wife-mother is unfulfilled until she discovers the women’s movement and gets a job at a department store.

Joe Keenan and Victoria Clark have adapted Lerner’s book, but they haven’t changed, added or cut enough of the original material. No problem. When the book rambles, the songs delight, and there are a lot of wonderful songs.

When “Love Life” first opened on Broadway, it carried the subtitle “a vaudeville.” For some reason, Keenan and Clark have expanded that to “a vaudeville in two parts.”

And that helps to explain what’s wrong with this revival’s direction, also by Clark. While the family goes through their never-very-engaging travails, which occur at regular intervals set decades apart, the chorus entertains with soft-shoe-style songs that tells us what’s going wrong with the marriage and why. Despite titles like “Progress” and “Economics,” they are witty and catchy tunes. Unfortunately, Clark emphasizes the vaudeville aspect by dropping a curtain in front of the principal performers whenever the chorus takes over to perform way downstage. By this director’s design, these two aspects of the show are never incorporated.

“Love Life” is best known today for its influence on three theater giants. Bob Fosse, Hal Prince and Stephen Sondheim all happened to see the original production and took elements of the show that ended up in such concept musicals as “Chicago,” “Cabaret” and “Company.” There, the vaudeville elements coalesce neatly with the book and featured songs.

Weill, who collaborated with Bertolt Brecht on “The Threepenny Opera” and “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” never found a great collaborator when he emigrated to the United States. He seems to have studied the American songbook, however. Songs in the first act of “Love Life” recall “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over” from “Carousel” and “Ol’ Man River” from “Show Boat” without ever sounding derivative. Most startling is to hear “I Remember It Well,” which Lerner lifted and adapted for the score of the 1958 film “Gigi” without crediting Weill for the melody.

The second act of “Love Life” features much darker music, and it’s here that Weill gives indications of his previous work with Brecht without ever, again, being derivative. “Susan’s Dream” recalls “Alabama Song” from “Mahagonny,” and “Is It Him or Is It Me?” is a plea for help not unlike Jimmy Mahoney’s “When the Sky Is Bright” from that 1930 opera. No one could write as tuneful a dirge as Weill.

Baldwin and Stokes Mitchell play the married couple in this Encores! revival, and while they can’t do much with the paper-thin roles, their superb singing voices make it well worth hearing, if not seeing.

The post ‘Love Life’ Off Broadway Review: Or, Why Kurt Weill Got Lost in America appeared first on TheWrap.