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‘Love Life,’ the Lost Great American Musical, Returns Over 75 Years Later

Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s pioneering “Love Life” was thwarted by circumstance. Now, it is coming to Encores! at New York City Center.

For some people, seeing the musical “Love Life” in 1948 was an eye-opening experience.

As a new show with music by Kurt Weill, and a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, it was a major Broadway event. So Stephen Sondheim got himself a ticket, as did his future collaborator Hal Prince. One night Fred Ebb, of Kander and Ebb, was in the house; another night, Bob Fosse.

All of them would be influenced by “Love Life,” which tells the story of an American marriage over 150 years through a series of vaudeville acts. It’s by no means a classic, but its form pioneered the concept musical, a genre that would blossom a generation later in shows like Kander and Ebb’s “Cabaret” and “Chicago,” and Sondheim’s “Company” and “Follies.”

Ebb would look back on “Love Life” as “a marvelous piece of theater.” Yet it hasn’t been seen in New York since that original run. Because of a musicians’ union strike, it was never recorded, nor was it published. Some songs lived on, but eventually it gained a reputation as the lost great American musical.

The 1948 production (with Nanette Fabray, center) was inspired, in part, by Alan Jay Lerner, who was recently divorced and interested in writing “a cavalcade of American marriage.”Billy Rose Theater Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

That is about to change. “Love Life” is finally returning to Manhattan on Wednesday, after decades of neglect and a five-year pandemic delay, for an Encores! production at New York City Center, directed by Victoria Clark and starring Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell.

“It’s always seemed that ‘Love Life’ was jinxed,” said the scholar Kim Kowalke, who runs the Kurt Weill Foundation. “Maybe the jinx is off now.”

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Source: Theater - nytimes.com


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