1946 American opera by Kurt Weill (music), Langston Hughes (lyrics), and Elmer Rice (book)
Street Scene is an American opera by Kurt Weill (music), Langston Hughes (lyrics), and Elmer Rice (book). Written in 1946 and premiered in Philadelphia that year, "Street Scene" is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1929 play of the same name by Rice.
It was Weill who referred to the piece as an "American opera", intending it as a groundbreaking synthesis of European traditional opera and American musical theater. He received the inaugural Tony Award for Best Original Score for his work, after the Broadway premiere in 1947. Considered far more an opera than a musical, "Street Scene" is regularly produced by professional opera companies and has never been revived on Broadway. Musically and culturally, even dramatically, the work inhabits the mid-ground between Weill's "Threepenny Opera" (1928) and Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story" (1957).
The score contains operatic arias and ensembles, some of them, such as Anna Maurrant's "Somehow I Never Could Believe" and Frank Maurrant's "Let Things Be Like They Always Was", with links and references to the style of Giacomo Puccini. It also has jazz and blues influences in "I Got a Marble and a Star" and "Lonely House" (see image). Some of the more Broadway-style musical numbers are "Wrapped in a Ribbon and Tied in a Bow", "Wouldn't You Like to Be on Broadway?" and "Moon-faced, Starry-eyed", an extended song-and-dance sequence. Benny Goodman and His Orchestra recorded "Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed" with Johnny Mercer on the vocal in 1947. It was also recorded by the jazz vocal group The Hi-Lo's for their 1958 Columbia LP "And All That Jazz".
Background.
In Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Weill had already begun to use American jazz and popular song elements in his operas. After fleeing from Nazi Germany in 1933, he worked in Paris, then England, and then, beginning in 1935, in New York. He made a study of American popular and stage music and worked to further adapt his music to new American styles in his writing for Broadway, film and radio. He strove to find a new way of creating an American opera that would be successful both commercially and artistically. Weill wrote:
It's my opinion that we can and will develop a musical-dramatic form in this country (America) but I don't think it will be called 'opera', or that it will grow out of the opera which has become a thing separate from the commercial theater, dependent upon other means than box-office appeal for its continuance. It will develop from and remain a part of the American theater – 'Broadway' theater, if you like. More than anything else, I want to be a part in that development.
Weill sought to create musical theatre that would "integrate drama and music, spoken word, song, and movement." He further wrote:
This form of theater has its special attraction for the composer, because it allows him to use a great variety of musical idioms, to write music that is both serious and light, operatic and popular, emotional and sophisticated, orchestral and vocal. Each show of this type has to create its own style, its own texture, its own relationship between words and music, because music becomes a truly integral part of the play – it helps deepen the emotions and clarify the structure.
Weill saw Rice's naturalistic play in 1930 and wanted to adapt it. As he wrote:
It was a simple story of everyday life in a big city, a story of love and passion and greed and death. I saw great musical possibilities in its theatrical device – life in a tenement house between one evening and the next afternoon. And it seemed like a great challenge to me to find the inherent poetry in these people and to blend my music with the stark realism of the play."
In 1936, Weill met Rice in New York and suggested the adaptation, but Rice turned him down. After the successes of Weill's "Knickerbocker Holiday" in 1938, "Lady in the Dark" in 1940, and "One Touch of Venus" in 1943 (and after Weill had composed incidental music for Rice's "Two on an Island" in 1939), Weill asked again, and Rice agreed. The two chose Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes to "lift the everyday language of the people into a simple, unsophisticated poetry", as Weill put it.
In order to enhance the realism of the new work, the collaborators utilized dialogue scenes, sometimes underscored by music. To create music that would portray the ethnic melting pot of characters described in Rice's book, Weill travelled to neighborhoods in New York, watching children at play and observing New Yorkers. Hughes took Weill to Harlem nightclubs to hear the newest musical idioms of black American jazz and blues. Hughes wrote: "The resulting song was composed in a national American Negro idiom; but a German, or someone else, could sing it without sounding strange or out of place." Weill and many critics have considered the score to be his masterpiece.
Production history.
After a tryout in Philadelphia at the Shubert Theatre, which opened Monday, December 16, 1946, revisions were made, and "Street Scene" opened on Broadway at the Adelphi Theatre on January 9, 1947. It closed on May 17, 1947, after 148 performances, experiencing high running costs. The production was directed by Charles Friedman, with choreography by Anna Sokolow, and produced by Dwight Deere Wiman and the Playwrights' Company (Maxwell Anderson; S. N. Behrman; Elmer Rice; Robert E. Sherwood; Sidney Howard). Scenic and lighting design were by Jo Mielziner; costume design was by Lucinda Ballard. The production starred Anne Jeffreys as Rose Maurrant, Polyna Stoska as Anna Maurrant, Norman Cordon as Frank Maurrant, Brian Sullivan as Sam Kaplan, Hope Emerson as Emma Jones, Sheila Bond as Mae Jones, and Danny Daniels as Dick McGann. Weill received the inaugural Tony Award for Best Original Score, and Ballard received the 1947 Tony Award for Best Costume Design, competing with other strong musicals that year, notably "Finian's Rainbow" by Burton Lane and "Brigadoon" by Frederick Loewe. The New York City Opera revived "Street Scene" several times, notably in 1959, 1979, and 1990.
The British premiere was a one-night only charity performance at the Palace Theatre in London on Sunday 26 April 1987. The show featured a starry cast of principals and walk-ons, including Rosemary Ashe, Maria Friedman, Alec McCowen, Matt Zimmerman, Kevin Colson, Steven Berkoff and Elaine Paige. A production by the English National Opera at the London Coliseum Theatre in 1989 included Catherine Zeta-Jones as Mae Jones. It was staged by the Minneapolis-based Minnesota Opera in 2001. Dicapo Opera staged the work in 2002 at the St. Jean Baptiste Church at Lexington Avenue and 76th Street in Manhattan.
The Opera Group, Young Vic, and Watford Palace Theatre gave the first UK production in 20 years in July 2008, winning the Evening Standard Award 2008 for Best Musical. Another production was performed in the grounds of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich on July 19, 2008, with the cast largely drawn from students from Trinity College of Music. In 2011, "Street Scene" was performed by the Opera/Music Theatre Workshop of Southeastern Louisiana University at the Pottle Music Auditorium, and, in German, by the Bayerische Theaterakademie August Everding and the Munich Radio Orchestra, led by Ulf Schirmer.
The Semper Oper in Dresden produced the work in June 2011, and The Opera Group presented the first performance in Austria in October that year. The first performance in Spain was in March 2013, at the Gran Teatre del Liceu and in 2018 at Teatro Real.
A production by Opera North that opened at the Grand Theatre, Leeds, in January 2020 was favourably reviewed; it ran there until 28 February then went on tour; a Leeds performance was recorded and broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on 11 April 2020.
Synopsis.
Summary.
The opera takes place on the doorstep of a tenement on the East Side of Manhattan on two brutally hot days in 1946. The story focuses on two plotlines: the romance between Rose Maurrant and her neighbor Sam Kaplan; and on the extramarital affair of Rose's mother, Anna, which is eventually discovered by Rose's irritable father, Frank. The show portrays the ordinary romances, squabbles and gossips of the neighbors, as the mounting tensions involving the Maurrant family eventually build into a tragedy of epic proportions.
Act 1.
As the curtain rises, we are introduced to some of the residents of the apartment block where the action takes place. Emma Jones and Greta Fiorentino lament the incredible heatwave that is gripping New York ("Ain't It Awful, the Heat?"). They are joined by another neighbor Olga Olsen, who tells of the stress of dealing with her newborn baby and her husband Carl, and an old man, Abraham Kaplan, who sings of the murders and scandals in the press, whilst joining in with the opening number. Henry Davis, the janitor, enters from the basement and sings of his ambitions to greater things ("I Got a Marble and a Star"). Young Willie Maurrant enters and calls for his mother, who enters at the window and throws him a dime to buy a soda. The three women (Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Fiorentino and Mrs. Olsen) persuade Mrs. Maurrant to come downstairs and be sociable, and as she descends, they gossip about the rumour that Mrs. Maurrant and Steve Sankey, the milkman, have been having an affair ("Get a Load of that"). Mrs. Maurrant comes down to chat and Mrs. Olsen goes back down to her cellar apartment to tend to her baby. Sam Kaplan comes out of the house and asks after Mrs. Maurrant's daughter, Rose, but she has not got back from work yet. He leaves to go to the library.
Daniel Buchanan enters, jittery; he is nervous because his wife is upstairs about to have a baby. He and the women sing of the perils of childbirth in a short arietta, "When a Woman Has a Baby". Just as he runs upstairs to tend to his wife, Mrs. Maurrant's husband Frank comes home. He mentions that he is going on a business trip to New Haven tomorrow, and argues with his wife about Rose not being home yet ("She Shouldn't Be Staying out Nights"). Fuming, he storms into the house, just as George Jones returns home from work and chats with the ladies for a while. Anna Maurrant sings an aria about the importance of putting your faith in a brighter tomorrow ("Somehow I Never Could Believe"). Steve Sankey enters and a tense scene ensues between him and the suspecting women. Almost immediately after he departs, Mrs. Maurrant heads off in the same direction, under the guise of going to look for her son. Mr. Jones, Mr. Olsen, Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Fiorentino sing more about the scandal ("Whatcha Think of That"). Mrs. Olsen runs in excited and says that she has just seen Sankey and Mrs. Maurrant standing close together around the back of a local warehouse.
Lippo Fiorentino returns home from work with an armful of ice cream cones for everybody. The two Fiorentinos, the two Olsens, Mr. Jones and Henry Davis sing a jubilant sextet praising ice cream ("Ice Cream Sextet"). Maurrant has been watching, and when his wife comes back he questions her about where she has been. She tells him she has been looking for Willie, and Maurrant and Abraham Kaplan argue about parenting, and later economics. Kaplan uses the example of the Hildebrand family who live upstairs, who are run by a struggling single mother who is unable to pay the rent, to illustrate his point. Maurrant and Kaplan's argument almost becomes physical, but the neighbors and Kaplan's granddaughter Shirley hold the two men back. Maurrant sings about how he longs for a return to traditional moral values in "Let Things Be Like they Always Was". Immediately after, Jennie Hildebrand and other high-school girls enter the street coming home from their graduation ceremony. The ensemble sings a jubilant celebration number, "Wrapped in a Ribbon and Tied in a Bow". Steve Sankey's entrance causes an abrupt end to the celebrations. After the awkward silence of the neighbors forces him to leave, Sam brings Willie Maurrant on in tears. Willie has been fighting with a local kid and Sam stepped in to break it up. Mr. Maurrant leaves to go to the local bar to have a drink, warning