Latest news with #Weill
The Guardian
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Meow Meow review – kamikaze cabaret combines clownish comedy and crooning
'I do think in 90 mins,' says the kamikaze cabaret performer Meow Meow, 'we can really make a difference.' It's a joke, clearly: in the face of encroaching tyranny and freedoms everywhere circumscribed, this blithering and eccentric diva seems unlikely to be much use. It's all she can do to get her show started, wheeling a piano effortfully onstage, replaying the whoops and cheers of bygone gigs and glories on a feeble Walkman. And yet, by the end of It's Come to This, Meow Meow – AKA Melissa Madden Gray – seems really to want to ask: what, in such ominous times, should the artist do? You can see why the question might concern her, engaged as she is with the songs of the Weimar era (Brecht and Weill's Ballad of the Soldier's Wife gets an outing here). Elsewhere, our big-haired, boundaries-free host twins chanson with clownish comedy in unique combination, now crooning Jacques Brel, now crawling cleavage-first over the shoulders of her crowd. As audience members are press-ganged on stage to fondle and manhandle its star, the show (with piano by Ben Dawson) can seem like an experiment to see how battily you can behave before the song you're singing is eclipsed entirely. The answer is: quite a lot, if your voice is as ravishing an instrument as Meow Meow. Occasionally, the shtick subsides and we get to really savour it. Equally often, that voice seeks attention for itself at the expense of the song. Latterly, the show devolves into worrisome political inquiry, as our host frets about the rise of nazism and Walter Benjamin's thoughts on the angel of history. Knowing what we know of the 1930s, what should we do now similar storm clouds are gathering? Her words 'I don't know' resounding like a siren, Meow Meow raises the alarm, but offers few answers. At Soho Theatre, London, until 24 May.
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Weill Cancer Hub East launches to transform treatment
The Weill Cancer Hub East, a collaborative initiative formed by Weill Cornell Medicine, Princeton University, The Rockefeller University and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, has been established to explore the interplay between nutrition, metabolism and immunotherapy in cancer treatment. The initiative was launched with a $50m gift from the Weill Family Foundation. The Weill Cancer Hub East brings together experts from the four institutions to improve immunotherapy, a therapeutic strategy that uses a patient's immune cells for treatment. It aims to drive cross-field partnerships, combining cancer biology, immunology, trials, metabolism and nutrition experts. With philanthropy from each partner institution, total funding will exceed $125m. Up to 2034, the hub will explore the connection between solid tumours and their environment. It also aims to understand how diet and beneficial microbes that help metabolise food can influence cancer treatment effectiveness. The initiative will investigate how emerging therapeutics such as glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonists are used in diabetes and anti-obesity treatments, which may affect cancer progression and treatment. The Weill Cancer Hub East will leverage metabolomics, computational analysis, immunology and AI to study how metabolism impacts the immune system's cancer-controlling ability. It will provide seed funding for collaborative projects focusing on reprogramming the tumour microenvironment and augmenting cell function through patients' metabolisms and microbiomes. The hub will provide a portfolio of trials, including assessment of the GLP-1 agonist effects on cancer subjects' immune responses and results. The outcomes may also apply to metabolic, autoimmune and cardiovascular conditions. The Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, a cancer research sponsor, is funding studies in cancer metabolism and immunotherapy, providing additional support to the hub's efforts. A scientific steering committee, with leaders from each academic institution, will oversee the hub's activities. The scientific strategy of the hub will be directed by a leadership committee, including representatives from partner institutions and the Weill Family Foundation. The adaptable structure of the hub will allow it to respond to upcoming directions in cancer research. The hub is the second collaborative entity established by the Weill family and the Weill Family Foundation through their philanthropy. Weill Family Foundation founder and Weill Cornell Medicine Board of Fellows chair emeritus Sandy Weill stated: 'The Weill Cancer Hub East will offer doctors and scientists a tremendous opportunity to revolutionise the treatment of cancer, a disease that complicates so many lives.' "Weill Cancer Hub East launches to transform treatment" was originally created and published by Pharmaceutical Technology, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.
New York Times
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Lost Great American Musical Returns, Over 75 Years Later
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. 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.' 'LOVE LIFE' WAS the only collaboration between its creators. Weill was near the end of his brief life but at the height of his skill, having reinvented himself as a composer for the American stage after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933. Always interested in top-shelf librettists, he had recently written the 1947 Broadway opera 'Street Scene' with Langston Hughes. Lerner, nearly 20 years younger than Weill, was several shows deep into his career-defining partnership with Frederick Loewe, and was fresh off the success of 'Brigadoon,' which briefly overlapped with 'Street Scene' on Broadway. Later that year, Rodgers and Hammerstein opened 'Allegro,' a failed musical about an ordinary man against the backdrop of modern life, told with Brechtian devices and a Greek chorus. 'Allegro' took a step toward the concept musical, but because of its reception, Rodgers and Hammerstein returned afterward to the integrated approach they had perfected in 'Oklahoma!' and 'Carousel' earlier in the 1940s. 'Love Life,' however, would take something more like a leap. It was inspired, in part, by Lerner's recent divorce. He was interested, he told Weill, in writing 'a cavalcade of American marriage.' The show that they developed was called 'A Dish for the Gods' at first, and, with a bit of armchair sociology, it aimed to trace how industrialization and modernity had affected relationships. They created a generic couple, Sam and Susan Cooper, and matched the phases of their marriage to developments in American history. In 1791, they would move to a small town with their two children; by the present day, they would divorce in New York. Along the way, they would never age, like the family in Thornton Wilder's 1942 play 'The Skin of Our Teeth,' and each scene would be commented on obliquely through vaudeville acts. In the age of the integrated musical, Weill and Lerner were about to serve Broadway audiences something that was disorientingly both nostalgic (vaudeville) and experimental (the concept musical). Anticipating some confusion, even resistance, they wrote an article in The New York Times shortly before opening night that imagined a conversation between them and a man on the street: 'Love Life' allowed Weill to survey American musical idioms. The opening, pastoral numbers have a quaintly Coplandesque sound, which is followed by styles like the foxtrot, boogie-woogie and 19th-century parlor song. Some of those styles came and went as the show was revised on its way to New York. And as the team behind it grew, so did expectations. Especially for Elia Kazan, who delayed rehearsals for 'Death of a Salesman' so he could he could direct 'Love Life.' Reviews, though, were mixed. In The Times, Brooks Atkinson described the musical as 'an intellectual idea about showmanship gone wrong,' even though he thought that Weill had 'never composed a more versatile score with agreeable music in so many moods.' With chilly reception and high operating costs, 'Love Life' ran on Broadway for less than a year, despite its Susan, Nanette Fabray, winning a Tony Award. Often, shows were able to extend their reach beyond New York by releasing cast albums and publishing a few hit numbers, which with any luck would be covered by popular artists and broadcast on the radio. None of that was possible for 'Love Life.' A labor action known as the Petrillo Ban meant that the pit musicians weren't allowed to record the show; it also curtailed the release of any songs on their own. The score went unpublished, as did Lerner's script. With no tour or film on the horizon, the show was doomed to obscurity. (The materials, however, were preserved and provided the basis of a recently published, exhaustive critical edition.) Nearly 20 years after the show closed, Kander and Ebb opened 'Cabaret,' which had elements of an integrated musical and 'Love Life'-style numbers that commented on the plot through nightclub acts. Prince was the director, and the set design was by Boris Aronson, who had also worked on 'Love Life.' Aronson went on to design the sets for 'Company' and 'Follies,' two Sondheim shows, like his much later 'Assassins,' that could be seen as descendants of 'Love Life,' with more evolved style and showmanship. In a 2011 interview, Sondheim acknowledged the similarities between 'Company' and 'Love Life,' and wondered whether it could have been even more influential if it had been a real success. 'If 'Love Life' or 'Allegro,' had been smash hits,' he said, 'the musical theater might very well have accelerated in terms of experimentation.' THE ENCORES! PRODUCTION aims to show how much of a success 'Love Life' could be. It came about seven years ago, over a lunch between Clark and Jack Viertel, the long-serving artistic director of Encores! until 2020. In an interview, Clark recalled telling Viertel that he needed 'more women directing these shows.' And she had herself in mind. Before she was a Tony-winning star, she was a director; she had studied with the likes of George C. Wolfe and Winnie Holzman in graduate school at New York University, and even earlier, as a student at Yale, had directed the first post-Broadway production of 'Merrily We Roll Along.' When Viertel asked Clark what show she would want, she said 'Love Life,' a musical she didn't know well but was intrigued by because of its subject matter. (She and her husband had divorced when their son was 4, but had remained close and even traveled together.) Viertel told her yes, and joked that no one else would direct it anyway. 'I'm the only director stupid enough to take it on,' Clark said. In a total coincidence, Duke University asked her soon after whether she would be interested in spending a semester there directing a workshop of, yes, 'Love Life.' Now, she just had to find a way into the story. 'This style of musical is very much in my bones and in my blood, but what didn't make sense to me was the script,' Clark said. 'It just wasn't landing, and I don't want to spend any time in the theater if I'm not learning something about myself, or learning what it means to be a human being.' The key, for her, was in the opening scene, a magician's act that brings Sam and Susan onstage from the audience, forcing them together as a catalyst for their 150-year retrospective. If she replaced the magician with the two children, she thought, that could provide an emotional spine for the entire musical. 'Who has the most at stake for their parents to talk and learn how to communicate again?' Clark said. 'The children. Then it feels like we're watching two children who love both of their parents and want them not to get together again, but to get to the point where they could all go to Shake Shack together.' The script didn't resist her idea; after all, 'Love Life' ends with the children watching as Sam and Susan slowly, cautiously walk toward each other on a tightrope. Other changes that Clark has made are more practical: There isn't enough time to properly rehearse a madrigal number, so it's gone. And the book has been streamlined to bring the show down to about two hours, its pace inspired by the way someone might flip through a photo album. If Clark does her job well, she said, today's audience members will be just as inspired as Sondheim was in 1948. 'Hopefully more people will want to see it, want to hear it and want to do it,' she added. 'My goal is for people to go, 'Oh my gosh, where has this show been all my life?''
