In “Street Scene” Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes conjured people torn between aspiration and despair
AT FIRST IT seems as if nothing much will happen on this sultry night in a poor Manhattan neighbourhood. In “Street Scene”, Kurt Weill’s “Broadway opera”, a large, shifting cast of characters—the immigrants, the misfits, the wannabes—play out their hopes and fears on a spiralling three-storey network of staircases and balconies designed to evoke a tenement block. But as morning follows night over this work’s 24-hour time-frame, the drama quickens.
A Jewish refugee from the Third Reich, Weill arrived in America in 1935. By the mid-1940s he had enjoyed Broadway success with “Lady in the Dark” and “One Touch of Venus”. This radical, modernist exile—he collaborated with Bertolt Brecht on works such as “The Threepenny Opera” and “The Seven Deadly Sins”—adroitly adapted to the musical climate of American showbiz.
Perhaps the eclecticism complicated the reception of “Street Scene”. Yet this hybrid creature has now found a near-definitive interpretation thanks to a company in the north of England. Opera North, based in the city of Leeds, has developed an ensemble style in which members of its robust, multitasking chorus step up to play leading solo roles. This approach pays splendid dividends. Characters spring from the crowd of tenants.
Yet Weill and Hughes now sound the more contemporary of the two creative teams. Rose refuses to compromise for isolated happiness in a fractious and divided society. Frank’s angry, resentful conservatism—telling newer immigrants to go back home, pleading “Let Things Be Like They Always Was”—now feels urgently topical. Meanwhile, bustling patter songs and stylish choral ensembles mean that comedy, satire and virtuosic stagecraft temper the ominous tone.
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