May 4 (Bloomberg) -- If you're looking for a musical that leaves its recent and current competition miles, if not light years, behind, ``LoveMusik'' is it. With Alfred Uhry's empathetically inventive book and Kurt Weill's unbeatable songs (composed with various top-notch lyricists), this is the one not to miss. It has everything, not least of all the sublimely gifted Michael Cerveris and Donna Murphy in the leading roles.

``Suggested,'' the program says, ``by the letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya.'' The spousal letters, edited and, where necessary, translated by Lys Symonette and Kim H. Kowalke, were published in a hefty tome as ``Speak Low (When You Speak Love)'' -- a title derived from a Weill song. The ample annotations and biographical supplements provided the structure of the musical, which, only sparsely quoting them, catches what Uhry has called ``the temperature of the letters.''

The dazzling couple, composer and singing actress -- once divorced and decisively remarried -- lived 26 years in a symbiosis as fruitful as it was turbulent. Both had affairs on the side (Weill even a lasting one), but from their meeting in 1924 to Weill's death in 1950 they were artist and muse- interpreter in one of the rare great marital collaborations in musical history.

Berlin Years

During their Berlin years, before Hitler drove them out, there was also the odious Bertolt Brecht, a great poet- playwright to provide pungent lyrics and librettos, from ``The Threepenny Opera'' (1928) to ``The Seven Deadly Sins'' (1933). Later, in Paris and eventually New York, Weill got words from an array of master lyricists, including Maxwell Anderson (``September Song,'' ``It Never Was You''), Ira Gershwin (``Girl of the Moment'') and Ogden Nash (``That's Him''). Almost every Weill song is a masterpiece, but, obviously, only those could be included that comment on, broaden or deepen the story.

Most of the songs are performed by the spouses and sometimes Brecht, as they were in life; a few by the appropriate others. Guiding it all is the conceiver and director Harold Prince, a master director and producer, whose extensive catalog includes some of the most important plays and musicals ever to have graced Broadway.

Prince's hand is detectable even in the amusingly erotic statuary of the proscenium arch, designed, like the rest of the arch and fluid scenery, by the gifted Beowulf Boritt, setting the scene saucily, speedily and succinctly -- stenographic scenography. We get also the projected titles Brecht and Weill devised for their ``epic theater,'' though more sparingly used here.

Channeling Lenya

The acting could not be bettered. Murphy, arguably our finest actress-singer, manages not only to sing and look like Lenya but also to capture her very essence: her tartness, timing, intonations and spirit; even her timbre, as it evolved from slightly squeaky soprano to smoky, experience-soaked mezzo.

No less on target is Cerveris's Weill, the three-piece- suited, proper cantor's son marrying a former child prostitute and shiksa, only to have both partners grow through this seeming mismatch. Cerveris admirably conveys a man obsessed with his music, his wife barely a close second -- not enough for Lenya, but often too much for Kurt. Without the slightest excess, Cerveris makes Weill enormously touching.

David Pittu is the spitting image of Brecht: arrogant, selfish, lecherous and unwashed -- you can see his carious teeth and sense his dirty fingernails. His and Cerveris's duet, ``Schickelgruber,'' is one of the show's brash highlights, which is not to say that when it speaks low or falls pregnantly silent ``LoveMusik'' doesn't hit equally home.

Back-Up Group

Fine work comes also from John Scherer as George Davis, Lenya's successful promoter and future husband, and the entire apt cast, with Brecht's polygyny amusingly stylized into a three-woman vocal and sexual back-up group.

Kudos also to Patricia Birch's subtly droll choreography, Judith Dolan's bull's-eye costuming, and Howard Binkley's trenchant lighting. Splendid, too, are Jonathan Tunick's orchestrations, seamlessly reconciling the close-to-the-bone Weillian with the meatier Broadway. My only slight cavil is with the use of heavy accents even for what was spoken in German, but I can see where accentual changes might have thrown less sophisticated audiences.

But never mind. ``LoveMusik,'' which in its last scenes moves us as only genius can, is easily forgiven. Though most of the show is comic or dramatic, the handling of Weill's death -- understated, imaginative, poetic -- transcends into tragedy. Yet the show ends on a note of quiet, highly suggestive hopefulness.

``LoveMusik'' is running at the Biltmore Theater, 261 W. 47th St. Information: +1-212-239-6200; http://www.telecharge.com.

(John Simon is the New York drama critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on this story: John Simon in New York at jis1925@aol.com

Last Updated: May 4, 2007 00:06 EDT