Lost in the Stars.(Lotte Lenya)(Biography)

Lotte 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 souffle 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 ...