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4 talented performers – 27 brilliant songs – 1 genius composer. Rediscover the forgotten sides of the incomparable Kurt Weill, after he fled Nazi Germany literally minutes before being arrested. Follow him into exile in France , then England , then America ; follow his search for collaborators to replace the razor-slashing talent of the nightmare dramatist, Bertolt Brecht. Sell-out or pioneer? Judge for yourself as you enjoy a host of haunting melodies and toe-tapping show-stoppers.

Rosemary Branch, 2 Shepperton Road N1 3DT. Tues July 7th to Sun July 26th. Tues – Sat performances 7.45 and Sunday 4pm.

Tickets: £12 and £10.

I first discovered the “non-Brecht” Kurt Weill in Ben Bagley’s 2 Weill albums in his “Revisited” series, augmented by the Weill material on the Alan Jay Lerner volume in the same series, and I’ve been performing Kurt Weill songs in cabaret since 1997, sometimes with my own words and sometimes using my translations of his French and German lyrics. So “Buddy on the Night Shift” became a new song “Good Morning Mr Milkman”, a song for a man staggering home after a night on the tiles; “Je Ne T’Aime Pas” became in translation “I Don’t Give A Damn”.

What I loved about the material was the really juicy theatrical quality of them. These songs were so actable, yet the tunes were so gorgeous. And there were – are – several things about Weill which intrigued me. The first was the question why his American shows were so little performed, since he spent over half his creative life in the US . The more I found out about them, the more I became convinced that it is Weill, not Rodgers and Hammerstein, who deserves the credit for inventing the integrated musical.

The second was the chameleon-like quality of the man. Wherever he went after he left Germany , he fitted in, musically; his French songs sound French, his score for “A Kingdom for a Cow” ( London , 1935) could pass in places for Noel Coward, and his American numbers can have all the Broadway pizzazz you could wish for, and more. Listen to Dorothy Loudon belting “Mr. Right” and you’ll see what I mean. And yet somehow it always remains Weill.

Thirdly, I was intrigued by the idea of Weill’s search. Here was a man who had worked with the foremost political dramatist of the century, Bertholt Brecht, going to the arch-capitalist, arch-frivolous milieu of Broadway. How did he make the transition? Did he sell out? Did he get bored with the pygmies around him? The truth is that he worked with what he had to hand, and he tried to make it as good – as serious – as he was allowed to. When he died he was working on “Huckleberry Finn” and after that he planned a musical of “Moby Dick”. You don’t get more serious than that.

And yet he faced a constant dilemma; on the one hand he could work with lyricists of the stature of Ira Gershwin, a superb technician addicted to wordplay and puzzles, but with not a lot to say. On the other he could and did work with other political writers – the leftist Paul Green, black gay poet Langston Hughes, the libertarian Maxwell Anderson - who had lots to say but mediocre talent as lyricists and often ended up being merely portentous.

And yet he managed the synthesis just twice, in the Tenement Opera “Street Scene” with Langston Hughes, and above all in the forgotten masterpiece which is “Love Life” (book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner); Lerner is one of the best crafters of words in the history of musicals, but he was a liberal/leftist who peppered his output with politics. Here his subject is the way that American capitalism has destroyed personal relationships. It follows one family through two hundred years, with vaudeville numbers performed front-of-cloth to cover scene changes. Weill was never more American, and never more himself.

You may ask why a gay theatre company should be doing a show about a heterosexual composer. Well, he worked with a lot of lesbians and gay men in his life, starting with his bisexual wife, Lotte Lenya. There is also something soft, almost feminine, about his character which responded to her butch decisiveness, and makes some of his work not a little camp.

But most importantly, I think gay people in particular will respond to someone who for most of his life had to “pass”. We understand the stresses and compromises that this involves, and more than others we should appreciate the triumph of preserving integrity while managing to reinvent himself not once but twice.

I won’t give away anything else about the show except to say that I would bet you won’t have heard more than a couple of these numbers, but you’ll be amazed by showstopper after showstopper.

Come and see it at the Rosemary Branch.