Harold Clurman and Elia Kazan always marveled at Weill’s uncanny ability to out-native the natives in his music....

In the 1940s, operetta seemed "cool" rather than "retro"....

More than 3000 American servicemen in World War I were actually named Johnny Johnson. “Johnny Johnson is a sort of morality play, an Everyman, if you will”....

The hidden star of the production was costume designer Frank Bevan, particularly for the way he rigged Huston’s garments to make him appear peg-legged. So widespread was the wonderment at Huston’s one-legged dancing in a chorus line that the actor got sick of talking to the press about it.

It put Gertrude Lawrence on the cover of Time, brought Ira Gershwin triumphantly back to Broadway, made a star of Danny Kaye, and was “the biggest therapeutic factor in [Moss] Hart’s own psychoanalysis” according to Hart’s friend, New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson.

In no other musical in the Broadway literature does the chorus provide so much momentum, or interact so seamlessly with the parallel score of solo songs, as in "Lost in the Stars."

Kurt Weill Newsletter Fall 2012 page 15

The score is a bravura round-up of every vernacular American style from Virginia reel to the blues. Weill composed, and discarded, more music for "Love Life" than for any other American work he wrote.

Kurt Weill Newsletter Spring 2010 page 4
A month after the show opened Weill wrote to his parents, “During the seven weeks before the show’s opening I never slept more than two or three hours a night, because I had to be at rehearsals during the day and had to orchestrate at night.”

When playwright Elmer Rice rejected the word “cockroach” in “Lonely House,” Weill muttered, “Brecht would have left the cockroaches in.”

Kurt Weill Newsletter Spring 2014 page 4

CSC review 2019