Opera: Street Scene
Leeds Grand Theatre from 12 February, then touring (operanorth.co.uk) Running time: 2hrs 45mins ★★★
This notoriously tricky work by the German composer Kurt Weill is the most ambitious and arguably the finest of his American period (193550), said Tim Ashley in The Guardian. A sprawling work with more than 30 named roles, and based on an earlier play by Elmer Rice, Street Scene depicts 24 hours in the lives of a largely immigrant community in a tenement block in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Plotwise, the focus is the murder of an unfaithful wife by a violent alcoholic husband. Musically, the piece is hard to classify and “at times uneven”. Big operatic arias are juxtaposed with Broadway numbers, and “jazz collides with Rossini”: at times you can’t help feeling Weill has overreached himself. Yet for all Street Scene’s limitations, Opera North have “done it proud”. Stick with it, and director Matthew Eberhardt’s production emerges as “fine, engaging music theatre, beautifully done”.
Eberhardt has indeed done a great job, agreed Fiona Maddocks in The Observer. The staging is clear; the “dramatic hierarchy of characters laid out deftly”. And the versatile Opera North orchestra, persuasively conducted by Kurt Weill specialist James Holmes, sounds just at home in Weill’s “bluesy, operative sonorities” as it does in Wagner or Mozart. The singing, too, is first-rate, said George Hall in The Stage. Giselle Allen is “luminous” as the desperate, caring Anna Maurrant;
Robert Hayward, Paul Gibson and Alex Banfield also excel in key roles; and several members of the Opera North chorus seize their moments in the limelight, giving fine individual performances in a “focused staging” that makes “the best possible case for the piece”.
I agree that Opera North has done this difficult work proud, said Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Telegraph, but that does not mean it has overcome the core problems of the piece. The score veers awkwardly between the idioms of “Berlin cabaret, Viennese operetta, Broadway musical and Hollywood B-picture” – and there’s no dramatic drive or psychological insight. There’s no denying that some passages are laboured and preachy, said Richard Morrison in The Times. Yet overall I found Street Scene a compelling, energetic, and fascinating piece. “I’d pay to see it again.”