Arnold Weinstein

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arnold Weinstein (1927-2005) was an American playwright and librettist, best known for his collaborations with composer William Bolcom, including the operas McTeague, A View From the Bridge (with Arthur Miller) and A Wedding (with Robert Altman).

Weinstein was born in 1927 in New York City, growing up in Harlem and the Bronx. He enlisted in the Navy during World War II and served on a destroyer. After the war, he attended Hunter College on the GI Bill, and later did graduate work at Harvard, eventually earning a Rhodes scholarship.

On a Fulbright Fellowship to Florence, Italy, Weinstein came to the attention of composer Darius Milhaud. Milhaud loved Mr. Weinstein's libretto "A Comedy of Horrors," but found it too American for his own tastes; he passed it on to his American student, William Bolcom, and the result was a show, later rechristened "Dynamite Tonight," an anti-war satire that opened at the Actors Studio in 1964, with a cast that included Alvin Epstein and Gene Wilder.

Notable works include the 1961 long-running off-Broadway show The Red Eye of Love, and an adaptation of "Ovid's Metamorphoses," which went to Broadway in 1971. With a new rock/blues score provided by his then collaborator and composer [1]Tony Greco, "Ovid's Metamorphoses" debuted at Gian Carlo Menotti's Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi in 1973. Weinstein collaborated with Greco on three subsequent original theatrical works: "The American Revolution" which premiered in 1973 at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., directed by Paul Sills; a musical of Weinstein's translation and adaptation of Garcia Lorca's poetry titled "Gypsy New York, at Cafe La Mama in 1974 produced by Gaby Rodgers, with art direction by the painter and long time friend, Larry Rivers; "Lady LIberty's Ice Cream Cone" directed by Barbara Harris in 1974 at the New York Cultural Center, and the San Francisco A.C.T. production of "America More Or Less," at The Marines Memorial Theatre in 1976. His work with Paul Sills, founder of the Second City Theater in Chicago, helped cement Mr. Weinstein's love of improvisational theater and adaptation.