citykAg tee yea/ tea eerars " Oakland Press :7- ady Wr0ed mak a cofizeiad _aril/ Observer & Eccentric NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE Open 7 days a week! from page 67 QM 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 1 O OFF TOTAL O ‘N BILL Not Good with any other offer. Expires 4/11/03. Thursday- Saturday 1 . OFF V r% TOTAL Li BILL Not Good with any other offer. Expires 4/11/03. 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