Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner: Love Life. Quirijn de Lang, Stephanie Corley, Themba Mvula, Justin Hopkins; Orchestra and Chorus of Opera North conducted by James Holmes. Capriccio. $29.99 (2 CDs).
A fascinating journey from the past to the past that was designed as a trip from the past to the present – and ironically is turning out, in some ways, to be just that – Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s Love Life is in some ways as much of an oddity now as it was when it came to Broadway in 1948. Subtitled A Vaudeville in Two Parts – not a play, not a musical, not an operetta, but a “vaudeville” – the production managed 252 performances from October 7, 1948, to May 14, 1949, and brought a Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical to Nanette Fabray. But it was scarcely a big success, and it divided critics and audiences alike by its forward-looking but rather peculiar approach to both love and life. Indeed, its title would be better as Love/Life, with a slash between the words, because it is all about the difficulties and interrelationships of the two concepts and the tightrope walk needed to try to maintain both – and it ends with a literal tightrope walk of the central couple, with the curtain falling on an ambiguous scene in which it is not clear whether the two will or will not succeed in meeting in the middle and, even if they do, whether that meeting will be a happy and lasting one or not.
Certainly the relationship of Sam and Susan Cooper is lasting and at least somewhat, or somewhat intermittently, happy. The show’s conceit is that the two have been together, without aging, from 1791 to 1948 – traveling through the changes in the American social fabric of 1821, 1857, 1894 and the 1920s before arriving in the “present day” of 1948 for the entire second act. Actually, the show starts in 1948 as well – with a magic act in which Sam and Susan are shown symbolically between the two words of the title, with Sam suspended in midair and Susan cut in half by the magician’s trick. This opening scene is bookended by the eventual tightrope walk – the two scenes involving Sam and Susan in performances-within-the-performance that, in the rest of the show, include a large number of small but important roles within the “vaudeville” concept that appears in the title of the totality.
Intellectually clever but emotionally bereft, Love Life tries to contrast the solid family values that Sam and Susan represent – along with their two children, Johnny and Elizabeth – with the societal stressors that toss the adults hither and thither and eventually bring them to divorce and then to discovery that things are not any better when they are separate than when they are together, so maybe they ought to be together after all if they can balance and move carefully on that symbolic tightrope.
The difficulty with the show is that the supposedly ideal, peaceful life of the Cooper family in 1791 – shortly after the United States became a nation – is, frankly, boring, musically speaking; and it is naïve in the extreme from a dramatic point of view. Sam and Susan are just not very interesting people, although the show picks up a surprising degree of relish because of 2026 being the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the United States and the assertion of its ideals. Actually, the Opera North production recorded live for the two-CD Capriccio release dates to 2025, but it reflects interestingly if unintentionally onto events of 2026. And to the credit of this British opera company, the accents and pronunciations of words are American, which matters in this context. The staging – described in detail in the accompanying booklet, which also includes a partial libretto consisting of everything spoken or sung on the recording plus summaries of material not on the CDs – appears to have been very thoughtful and clever, and the whole release would probably work better as a DVD than in non-visual CD form. But the underlying conceit, that the Coopers live their lives while interspersed “vaudeville” elements comment on all the societal changes that affect and ultimately shatter their marriage, is certainly clear enough on these discs.
The show’s conceptualization is much more interesting than its central characters. It is vaguely opposed to American-style capitalism – the very first “vaudeville” is mildly sarcastic about “Progress,” the second about “Economics,” and so on. But there is none of the bite that Weill’s work had in The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny – which come from an earlier time than Love Life and which were built around the words of Bertolt Brecht, who had far stronger and more-intense left-wing attitudes than the rather mild and modest ones of Lerner (indeed, they were so strong that they eventually led to a permanent split between Brecht and the more-moderate Weill). Love Life does not offer Weill’s best music, although his determination to do his own orchestrations – the exception rather than the rule in Broadway productions – was a good one, adding much more flavor than there might otherwise have been in “Women’s Club Blues,” the Jazz Age material, the “Green-Up Polka” and other numbers. The foundational notion of ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives while commentary numbers (sung by unnamed ensemble members; think of Non-Player Characters in contemporary video games) swirl around them seems very modern indeed, and gives Love Life a pointedness that it would otherwise lack. And the Opera North cast is really excellent. Quirijn de Lang and Stephanie Corley sing very well and seem well-settled together, if lacking in romantic sparks – which would seem out of place in this story anyway. Themba Mvula is show-stealingly effective as the Magician at the show’s start and the Con Man/Interlocutor in its final scene, in which he offers Sam and Susan several illusions to make them happy – including one of Susan finding “Mr. Right,” a fairytale notion that long predates Love Life and persists to the present. And one “vaudeville” singer, the Hobo, is especially fine in Justin Hopkins’ first-rate presentation of “Love Song,” a high point of the show. Another musical high point, the “Modern Madrigal” that introduces the second part of Love Life, is so good that it creates a feeling of what might have happened if the rest of the score had been at its level.
Conductor James Holmes is a Weill specialist, and it shows in his snappy handling of the orchestra throughout the performance. Opera North’s orchestra does a great job with the genre-shifting score – Weill here makes up in musical selectivity what he lacks in snap and bite. The singing by the chorus, and by chorus members called on for individual roles in the various “vaudeville” sections, is excellent. This is the first recording of Love Life: labor troubles meant that there was no original-cast recording of the 1948 production. Like elements of the story itself, that fact of labor unrest and dissatisfaction gives Love Life, which in many ways is very much of its time, a sense of 21st-century relevance and meaningfulness. Retrospectively important in its design, elements of which significantly influenced later musicals, the show is less than outstanding because it does not feature Weill's best music or any particularly effective social commentary – with the "good" scenes being rather dull, and with Sam and Susan being not especially distinctive or interesting. Lerner wrote the book for the show; he and Weill did the lyrics together; but the focus on staging, which gives Love Life its distinctiveness, seems to have taken up more of the creativity of the creators than the development of a genuinely engaging story. Still, if it is hard to love Love Life, it is not difficult to admire it intellectually and to appreciate its exploration of the daily duality requiring choice, and balance, and the eternal tightrope walk between the personal portions of life and those that are societally determined.
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