Rebecca Jo Loeb singing “Mr. Right” in the Theater Freiburg production.
LOVE LIFE
A Vaudeville in Two Parts
Book by Alan Jay Lerner
Music and Lyrics by Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner
“A cavalcade of American marriage.”
Love Life tells the story of a married couple, Sam and Susan Cooper, who never age as they progress from 1791 to 1948, encountering difficulties in their marriage as they struggle to cope with changes in American society and economy.
Read the full synopsis here.
Articles
Videos
LOVE LIFE RETURNS TO ENCORES! IN MARCH 2025! New videos soon!
Following the Pandemic cancellation of the planned 2020 production of Love Life, Victoria Clark, Rob Berman, and Jack Viertel appeared in a video to discuss the work and feature excerpts of rehearsal performances by the production’s leads Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell along with Brandon Burks, Jonathan Christopher, John Edwards, John-Michael Lyles, and Heath Saunders.
Victoria Clark introduces Love Life.
“This is the Life” (Michael Scarborough; BBC broadcast, Dec 31, 1992)
“Mr. Right” (Judy Kaye; BBC broadcast, Dec 31, 1992)
“Green-Up Time” (Nanette Fabray on The Ed Sullivan Show, Dec 12, 1948)
Production Photos
Love Life on Broadway
April 1947 First meeting of Weill and Lerner.
April-June 1947 Lerner conceives basic idea for Love Life.
November 1947 First draft of script completed (it has not survived).
17 March 1948 Weill and Lerner deposit a script for copyright under the title of “A Dish for the Gods.”
May-July 1948 Major revisions and songs added.
Mid-June 1948 Weill begins orchestrating.
9 August 1948 Rehearsals begin.
September 1948 Out-of-town tryouts. Lerner later wrote, “Then we opened in New Haven. Between that day and the day—three and a half weeks later—when we opened in New York practically every scene in the play was rewritten and three completely new scenes were added.”
7 October 1948 Broadway opening at the 46th Street Theatre (now the Richard Rodgers).
17 October 1948 Weill writes to Madeleine Milhaud: “…the play has become the most discussed theater evening of the season. It has been sold out since the opening, the audiences love it, and I think it has a good chance to survive.”
24 April 1949 Nanette Fabray wins the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for Love Life.
14 May 1949 Love Life closes after 252 performances.
Some Distinguished Voices on Love Life
“Most people didn’t see [Love Life], so they don’t think of [it] as having the kind of effect that Oklahoma! had. But I think [it] did.”
— Stephen Sondheim, quoted in Steve Swayne, How Sondheim Found His Sound (Michigan, 2005)
“I think Love Life’s script is far and away the best thing Alan Jay Lerner ever wrote for the stage. It is totally original, and it has a remarkable vision of how to use musical theater as dramaturgy to make a philosophic point.”
— Miles Krueger, quoted in Gene Lees, Inventing Champagne (St. Martin’s Press, 1990)
“A marvelous piece and a major influence. I was amazed it wasn’t a bigger success.”
— Fred Ebb, quoted in Kurt Weill on Stage
“Love Life and Allegro were the first concept musicals. They were the first of their kind. Subconsciously, when I first saw them, I noted that they were shows driven by concepts. They didn’t work, though I was too young at the time to realize that. (Weill’s score is swell, by the way.) Were the shows upstaged by their concepts? In both cases you were so aware of the concept and the craft.”
— Harold Prince, quoted by Foster Hirsch, Kurt Weill on Stage from Berlin to Broadway (Knopf, 2002)
“It is simultaneously one of the least well-known and most influential of his works, a paradox that can be explained by the fact that it had a big effect inside the profession but was not well remembered by the public.”
— Eric Salzman, in The New Music Theatre (Oxford, 2008)
“The best numbers combine lyrical catchiness with the keen harmonic and instrumental inventions that give Weill’s music its distinctive, ‘insidious’ quality.”
— Andrew Porter, The New Yorker, July 1990
