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in Berlin in 1929 with playwright
Bertolt Brecht.
Intended as a sequel to The
Threepenny Opera, the musical's plot
about a Salvation Army lieutenant and
a gang of thieves, strongly resembles
that of George Bernard Shaw's Major
Barbara. Brecht loved Shaw, though
the musical's origins remain shrouded
in speculation.
The show, in Michael Feingold's
translation, had originated Off-
Broadway before moving to Broadway
in 1977 with Meryl Streep as the
Salvation Army lass. Despite critical
kudos, great Weill melodies and a
Tony nomination for Feingold for
Best Book of a Musical, theatergoers
stayed away and it closed after a brief
run.
"Brecht doesn't do well in Broadway
houses," says Feingold, who has
worked in the theater for more than
three decades as a critic, playwright,
translator, lyricist, director and liter-
ary manager.
A 1966 graduate of Columbia
University and the Yale School of
Drama in 1972, he is best known as
the chief theater critic for the New
York weekly the Village Voice.
Feingold had a traditional Jewish
upbringing in Chicago and Highland
Park, Ill., where his mother was a
piano teacher.
After moving to New York, where
he started writing for the Village Voice,
Feingold returned to Yale for a pro-
duction of Brecht and Weill's
Mahagonny Songplay (The "Little"
Mahagonny), for which he had done
the translation.
During intermission, Feingold met
Lotte Lenya, Weill's widow, who
praised the translation. Lenya and
Robert Brustein, artistic director of
the Yale Rep and Feingold's mentor,
suggested doing Happy End, which
had never been produced. Feingold,
who reads German and French fluent-
ly, would translate and adapt it for a
production the following season.
"It's such a wonderful score to lis-
ten to when it's well sung," he says.
"It's so varied, and the big songs cut
so deep.
Although he's not an observant Jew,
Feingold says his Jewishness deeply
affects his thinking. "And, of course, it
is one of the sources of my sense of
kinship with Kurt Weill," he says.
"
Royal Partnership
The Shaw Festival season also includes
Sunday-Wednesday
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FRESH SOUPS SALADS & CREPES
Betty Comden and Adolph Green: A little chutzpah.
172 N. Old Woodward
one of the best stage plays ever writ-
ten about a theatrical family, The
Royal Family by George S. Kaufman
and Edna Ferber. The 1927 comedy
revolves around the greatest acting
family in America, whom its creators
dubbed Cavendish, but everyone
knew was a send-up of the Barrymore
and Drew families.
Kaufman and Ferber shared similar
backgrounds. Both were born in the
Midwest, and had
the same German-
Jewish heritage.
Each had worked as
a newspaper writer.
And both had a dif-
ficult childhood.
Edna Ferber was
born in 1887 in
Edna Ferber
Kalamazoo, Mich.,
the daughter of an
unsuccessful busi-
nessman and invalid
father and a strong
mother. Edna had
to help support the
family right after
high school.
It was her moth-
George S.
er's shrewd business Kaufman
sense that saved the
family, and she was a source of
Ferber's many stories of strong women
married to weak men.
When Ferber moved to New York
in 1912, where she would live for the
rest of her life, she was already a
nationally known successful fiction
writer. In 1925, Ferber won the
Pulitzer Prize for the novel So Big.
Ferber never married, and her
diaries give no hint of any strong
romantic attachments. In the book
Ferber: A Biography, a great-niece
quotes her as saying, "I have never
married. And I'm glad I never mar-
ried," but adding that marriage is a
major life experience that no one
should miss "if you can stand it."
George Simon Kaufman was born
in 1889 in Pittsburgh. His father was
an unsuccessful businessman and his
mother, a hopeless neurotic obsessed
with dying. Physically weak and over-
protected by his mother, Kaufman
used words as weapons.
After a failed attempt at law school,
he-had some of his humorous sketches
published, which helped land him a
job as the humor columnist for the
Washington Times. By 1917, he had
become the drama editor of the New
York Times, a position he held until
1930.
A prodigious and highly successful
writer for Broadway, Kaufman won a
1932 Pulitzer Prize for Of Thee I Sing,
the first ever awarded a musical, and
his second Pulitzer for You Cant. Take
It With You, in 1937. The Man Who
Came To Dinner put Kaufman on the
cover of Time magazine as the most
successful comic playwright of the
1920s and 1930s.
Together, Ferber and Kaufman
wrote six plays between 1924-1948,
including Dinner at Eight, Stage Door
and Bravo!. The Royal Family was their
second collaboration.
Kaufman died in New York City in
1961, Ferber in 1968.1-1
For tickets or information on the
Shaw Festival, call (800) 511-
7424 or go to the Web site at
-vvww.shawfest.corn.
(NE corner of Maple & N. Old Woodward)
(248) 283-0260
Cimteximtrat ect.f0,94 Coi6imb
r
Entire Bill
of s4000 or more
Tuesday - Thursday
expires 4/3/03
lasiest Parking: North Old Woodward parking ded just
north of lacohson's men's store or directly hehind us.
Sint two hours FREE!
Hours: Tues.-Thurs. 5-9; Fri. & Sat. 5-10
280 NORTH OLD WOODWARD
BIRMINGHAM': MI
248.646.7001
www.detroitjewishnews.com
Find out
before your mother!
3
3/28
2003
69