Tickets went on sale Feb. 9 for an upcoming, almost one-of-a kind musical performance that will be streaming in March. Otterbein University Theatre & Dance, located in Westerville, Ohio (a suburb of Columbus), will be filming and streaming a production of “Into a Lamplit Room: The Songs of Kurt Weill,” starring Kansas Citian Max Pinson in the role of Kurt Weill.
Pinson, a member of The Temple, Congregation B’nai Jehudah and a graduate of Blue Valley Southwest High School, is a sophomore at Otterbein pursuing his Bachelor of Fine Arts in musical theatre.
The life of composer and social activist Kurt Weill is celebrated in this cabaret-style compilation of his work, which includes more than 30 songs ranging from his life in Berlin during the Weimar Era, during which he was a voice against the Nazi regime, to his emigration to the U.S. where he was a supporter of the American war effort in the 1930s, and finally his contributions to the American musical theater canon.
Audiences will most likely recognize his collaborations with Ira Gershwin, Bertolt Brecht and Maxwell Anderson in songs written for Broadway, including “Tchaikovsky,” “Mack the Knife,” “Pirate Jenny” and “September Song.” His themes of love, sex, politics and equality made him an artist and a voice ahead of his time, or perhaps the ideal voice for our world today.
“Into a Lamplit Room” was first performed at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music as part of “A Kurt Weill Celebration” in March 2013.
This production’s title comes from a quotation etched on Weill’s gravestone at the Mount Repose Cemetery in Haverstraw, New York. The text comes from the song “A Bird of Passage” from Weill and playwright Maxwell Anderson’s 1949 musical “Lost in the Stars,” itself adapted from a quotation from the Venerable Bede:
“This is the life of men on earth:
Out of darkness we come at birth
Into a lamplit room, and then — Go forward into dark again.”
The fully staged production was filmed in various locations on and off the Otterbein campus and is available virtually via four scheduled, ticketed streaming events March 18-21. Tickets are available at $15 per device on the Otterbein Theatre webpage at otterbein.edu/theatre-performances.
Pinson is the son of Janice Pinson who resides in Kansas City, Missouri.
