Mail-Ardor Bride  Expressionist vaudeville meets the musical,
via Weill-Lenya letters  What becomes a composer with a
conflicted legacy most? An equally dichotomous piece of musical
theater. Make no mistake about it: LoveMusik, the new show
that's "suggested by" the letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya,
is one of the sharpest productions, both visually and
intellectually, to open on Broadway this season. But it's also
one of the most difficult to categorize. It's not historically
rigorous enough to be a musical biography of the composer and
singer, nor is this sampling of Weill's music a simple jukebox
musical. As it contains visual references to everything from
early-20th-century German drama to Guys and Dolls to director
Harold Prince's own Cabaret and Evita, LoveMusik can, at times,
feel like a sampled collage of musical theater history, even as
Alfred Uhry's book charts, though not thoroughly, Weill and
Lenya's careers and tumultuous relationship (marriage, a
divorce, a remarriage, and numerous affairs).