Our university’s recent production of Kurt Weill’s Street Scene showcases a relatively straightforward performance of the opera by Kurt Weill, Langston Hughes and Elmer Rice. The drama of a group of neighbors along an ordinary New York tenement in the 1940s, Street Scene (as produced by the theatre department) seeks to illustrate the inherent drama and tension of ordinary American city life, and the universality of those conflicts to human history. Through the elements of performance and lighting, Street Scene elevates the domestic dramas of these New York characters into universal themes that resonate greatly with the audience.
On a pair of hot days in 1946, Street Scene tells the tale of a group of families living on an East Side tenement in Manhattan. Chief among these storylines is the budding romance between star-crossed neighbors Sam and Rose, as well as the domestic problems of Rose’s parents, particularly an affair her mother Anna is having behind the back of the irritable Frank. Eventually, Frank catches Anna in bed with her paramour and shoots her dead; he is later arrested by the police. This, in turn, destroys Sam and Rose’s romance, as well as her confidence that two people can be together in this world. In the wake of these events, life in New York resumes unabated.
In relaying these themes of incredible tragedy in ordinary circumstances, this production utilized performance in intriguing ways. As per usual in an opera, the entire cast incorporates operatic singing and vocal projection in every line, which elevates their performances to something bigger and more demonstrative than if this were a normal character drama. Rather than depicting these citizens of New York like naturalistic Americans, the actors in Street Scene project huge emotions and incredible passion into these daily conversations. Of particular note is Adelmo Guidarelli’s Frank Maurant, whose booming baritone conveys the brusque authoritarianism the character uses to try to control his family and neighborhood through force.
The same kind of approach is used for the lighting, which, while simple, conveys the simple rhythms of day and night that keep Street Scene both grounded in realism and elevated by presentationalism. The play mostly uses general washes to convey day and night, but these lighting schemes lend each scene a distinct mood – the day scenes offer the semblance of safety, while the night is usually when Sam and Rose engage in their clandestine romance, or Frank is at his angriest. These elements underline the operatic drama that is being injected into this portrait of ordinary American life.
While the university’s production of Kurt Weill’s Street Scene does not alter the intended structure of the play in many respects, its dedication to the conceit of setting an opera in a New York tenement allows the performances and lighting to contrast the everyday concerns of normal Americans with the larger-than-life nature of an opera. With average Joe characters performing their scenes in full-voice opera, their concerns become bigger and more prominent, and the slow shifting of day to night using lighting echoes the ebb and flow of these characters’ moods and motivations. To that end, this particular production succeeded very well in translating Weill and Hughes’ intentions to the stage, showcasing the inherent universality of the American experience by lifting our everyday concerns to the level of high drama.
Works Cited
Weill, Kurt, Hughes, Langston and Elmer Rice. Street Scene. 1946. Perf. SUNY Purchase Opera
& Purchase Symphony, 1990.
