Berlin cabaret meets Broadway musical meets Hollywood B-movie
Street Scene Opera North, Grand Theatre, Leeds
Never one to duck a challenge, Opera North has tried very hard over the years to promote the stage works of Kurt Weill, mounting
productions of The Threepenny Opera,
Der Kuhhandel and The Seven Deadly Sins from his European years, as well as Love Life and One Touch of Venus from his American exile. With Street
Scene, they may have reached the end of the road.
Although it has been respectfully revived several times since its New York premiere in 1947, this is a piece that remains hobbled by a plot that never rises above cliché and a score that fluctuates awkwardly between the idioms of Berlin cabaret, Viennese operetta, Broadway musical and Hollywood B-picture, yielding only one standout number along the way: the melancholy Lonely House, beautifully sung here by Alex Banfield.
As is evident from the rich colours in the orchestral writing, Weill had a vastly more sophisticated technique than George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers, to name two comparisons. But their masterpieces Porgy and Bess and Carousel wipe the floor with Street
Scene in terms of both memorable melody and emotional impact.
The libretto is drawn from a play by Elmer Rice, dating from 1929 and set outside a Manhattan tenement block inhabited by a melting pot of immigrants who chatter, kvetch, quarrel and go about their business. An unhappily married couple, the Maurrants, come to grief; there’s a fragile young love between the sweet Irish girl Rose and earnest Jewish Sam.
Nothing much develops until the last half-hour, when an outbreak of violence leads to a peremptory and melodramatic climax. We haven’t been told enough about the victim or the perpetrator of the murder to care about its consequences, and the reaction of those affected is entirely implausible. There’s no impetus driving the drama, and no psychological insight either.
Yet Opera North has done Weill’s work proud. Matthew Eberhardt’s staging, designed by Francis O’connor and lit by Howard Hudson, is clear, unfussy and sympathetic: I only wish they had evoked a hotter and dirtier inner-city atmosphere – people here are rough and up against it, but their clothes seem to have come freshly pressed. Something more sweaty and sensual exudes from James Holmes’s warmly phrased conducting.
The cast showcases Opera North’s versatile and characterful chorus, with Banfield and Gillene Butterfield most engaging as Sam and Rose, and a host of sharply focused cameos making up their community. Giselle Allen and Robert Hayward play the embattled Maurrants – Allen is vocally strong, though Hayward is rather dour and underwhelming as the bullying husband. A gang of unruly kids is terrific; their number Catch Me If You
Can brings this slightly sleepy performance zinging into life.