Fool of God

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According to the Group, which is producing "Johnny Johnson" …, the piece in question is a "legend." That phrase will serve well enough in its place on the program, but it will hardly do to describe the curious fantasy, half musical and half dramatic, which Paul Green and Kurt Weill have concocted between them. The matter is as serious as possible, the manner often so broad as almost to suggest vaudeville or a revue, and yet the whole is somehow strangely effective. I am, in general, no great partisan of the experimental techniques, but "Johnny Johnson" is both amusing enough and moving enough to justify itself very handsomely indeed. (p. 675)

Everyone will, I fancy, agree that the piece is at times ragged and uncertain. Every now and then the mood is broken, every now and then the author of the text seems to lose his sense of style, and to write a speech or a scene too realistic on the one hand or too near burlesque on the other really to harmonize with the dominant manner, which is poised at some definite point between the two. But however far short it may fall of perfection, its success in general is never in doubt, and the thing is held together by Kurt Weill's score, which seems to me not only ideal for the purpose but consistent in a way that the text is not. (p. 676)

Joseph Wood Krutch, "Fool of God," in The Nation (copyright 1936 The Nation magazine, The Nation Associates, Inc.), Vol. 143, No. 23, December 5, 1936, pp. 675-76.

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