by Charles Willard

It is hardly surprising if your knowledge of Love Life is scant, because the afterlife of this show—that network of recordings, tours, stock productions that truly imprints most musicals on the public consciousness—simply never happened for Love Life.

Photo: Magician from the 1948 Broadway production

by Joel Galand

Just what was it about Love Life that made it “experimental”? The authors subtitled Love Life unconventionally, not as a “musical comedy” or a “musical play” or even just “a new musical,” but as a “vaudeville.”

Photo: Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner working on Love Life

by Bradley Rogers (University of Toronto Press, 2020)

When Love Life opened on Broadway in 1948, many critics felt that the musical theatre had reached new heights—with some going so far as to call the show “one of the most extraordinary productions in years, perhaps the most mature musical play the American stage has yet produced.”

Photo: “Green-Up Time” from the 2017 Theater Freiburg production

by Stephen Hinton (University of California Press, 2012)

Weill described Love Life as “a study of marriage in the last 100 years.” His description raises a question about the subtitle “A Vaudeville,” which sits uneasily with the notion of “a study,” as it was no doubt intended to. What are the precedents for this contradiction? Or are Weill and his collaborator Alan Jay Lerner establishing one?

Photo: “Locker Room” from the 1996 Opera North production

by Joel Galand

When audiences resist a work of art… it may be opening a window on some uncomfortable truths. The journal Theatre Arts dubbed Love Life “a Kinsey Report in a lace-paper binding.” That quip suggests that although its subject matter transcended the horizon of expectations for a musical play and was to that extent ahead of its time, Love Life was also timely.

Photo: Nanette Fabray from the 1948 Broadway production

by Kim H. Kowalke

Cabaret’s “concept” was to alternate narrative scenes containing traditional, non-diegetic “plot” numbers with diegetic “commentary” numbers. And indeed the non-linear structure of Cabaret is almost identical to that of Alan Jay Lerner and Kurt Weill’s Love Life.

Photo: Mayville setting from the 1948 Broadway production