Street Scene not typical Broadway
A Broadway opera with a tragic ending? Improbabilities don’t get much more improbable.
And yet, such is what premiered at New York’s Adelphi Theatre on the night of Jan. 9, 1947, with music by Kurt Weill, lyrics by the distinguished Black poet Langston Hughes and book by Elmer Rice, drawn from his Pulitzer Prize-winning play of 1929.
Street Scene is a one-of-a-kind work, receiving what is thought to be its Toronto premiere this week at the MacMillan Theatre, under the auspices of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music.
“Today’s opera singers have to be versatile,’’ insists Michael Albano, the opera division’s resident stage director and director as well of Street Scene, and it is worth remembering that no less an operatic diva than Renée Fleming recently appeared In Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel.
Not that Street Scene is a typical Broadway show. It was Weill himself who had it published as “an American opera’’ and thought of it as the culmination of a musical development that began with his most famous work, The Threepenny Opera (1928), written in collaboration with Bertolt Brecht.
As commentators have long acknowledged, the score embodies a number of styles — there is even a jitterbug — and is mostly through-composed, with music even underscoring spoken dialogue, as in films.
Weill went so far as to identify some of the numbers as arias, one of them for the central character lasting fully seven minutes. Casting that character, Frank Maurrant, represents one of the difficulties in producing Street Scene.
“There are 37 named characters, a challenge in itself but a welcome opportunity for a music school,’’ Albano explains, “and Frank Maurrant is an especially challenging baritone role.
“So we used the opportunity to invite Peter McGillivray back, 15 years after graduating, and it has been a special experience for the kids to rehearse alongside a seasoned professional. It has been a homecoming for him as well.”
Frank Maurrant is central to the action, murdering his wife and lover in a fit of jealousy in what one writer has described as a “tragedy of the common man,’’ set in a rundown New York tenement (recreated here by veteran designer Fred Perruzza). A gritty tale, to be sure, and although he participated in the musicalization of his play, Rice reportedly found it a difficult experience to “soften’’ its edges. On the other hand, it can be argued that Street Scene opened the way for other operatic composers to follow Weill’s lead in treating unglamorous contemporary subjects, as Marc Blitzstein was to do in Regina and Gian Carlo Menotti in The Saint of Bleecker Street.
Weill had an active career in his American years, much of it in the commercial theatre, with such hits as Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus. The Glimmerglass Festival even recently revived his “musical tragedy’’ Lost in the Stars.
But to some commentators, crossing the Atlantic as a fugi- tive from Nazi persecution took the German-born composer away from his roots, not to mention his career as a “serious’’ composer of symphonies and more ambitious stage works (Bruno Walter, no less, conducted the premiere of his Second Symphony in Amsterdam). So just as Street Scene is widely regarded as a hybrid work, so Weill himself is sometimes called a hybrid composer, with one foot esthetically on either side of the Atlantic.
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians has nevertheless described him as “one of the outstanding composers in the generation that came to maturity after World War One, and a key figure in the development of modern forms of musical theatre.”
He might have written the assessment himself. Keenly aware of his place in history, he called his Threepenny Opera “a new genre of musical theatre” and wrote of exploring “that vast unexplored field between grand opera and musical comedy.’’ He may not have been an accurate prophet when claiming that “seventy-five years from now Street Scene will be regarded as my major work.’’ But it is easy to understand why Albano and Sandra Horst (conductor of the University of Toronto production) could have fallen for it several years ago when working for Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.
The still unanswered question is why it has taken so long for such a notable work to reach a Toronto stage.
Street Scene is at the MacMillan Theatre, 80 Queen’s Park, Nov. 22 to 25. See music.utoronto.ca for details.
William Littler is a Toronto-based music writer and a freelance contributor for the Star.