Kurt Weill

Kurt Weill was born on March 2, 1900 in Dessau, Germany as Kurt Julian Weill. He was married to Lotte Lenya.

Born to a religious Jewish family, he went to Berlin in 1918 to study music composition and wrote his first symphony at that time.

Weill emigrated from Germany to the US with the rise of Nazism. He was known for his use of highly unusual subject matter in musicals. Few of them were true hits. "The Threepenny Opera", written in cooperation with Bertolt Brecht, which premiered in Germany (1928), introduced the song "The Ballad of Mack the Knife" and became a hit. In its first American production on Broadway, it flopped in 1933, but became a smash off-Broadway hit in Marc Blitzstein's 1954 translation, running more than five years. Weill's widow Lotte Lenya received a Tony Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1956 for playing "Jenny" in this version of the play.

His works for Broadway include several respected shows such as "Lady in the Dark" (1941), "Love Life" (1948) and "Lost in the Stars" (1949).

Won Broadway's 1947 Tony Award as Best Composer for "Street Scene."

Inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.

All of the television versions of Weill's Broadway musicals have actually been more faithful than the theatrical film versions--with the exception of "Lost in the Stars", which was filmed faithfully in 1974 (Lost in the Stars (1974)), but never adapted for television.

His musical "Lady in the Dark" was awarded the 1997 London Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Musical.

He was nominated for a 1998 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for "Lady in the Dark", performed at the Royal National Theatre: Lyttelton, for Best New Musical of the 1997 season.

"A Kurt Weill Cabaret" at the Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre in Chicago, Illinois was nominated for a 2015 Joseph Jefferson Non-Equity Award for Revue Production.