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Street Scene
Music by Kurt Weill
Lyrics by Langston Hughes
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Elmer Rice
Directed by David Walsh
Thursday, April 19, 7:30 p.m.
Friday, April 20, 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, April 21, 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, April 22, 1:30 p.m.
Ted Mann Concert Hall
Synopsis
German-born composer Kurt Weill had met American playwright Elmer Rice shortly after landing in America in the mid-1930s in flight from Nazi persecution. He soon began to consider the possibility of turning Rice’s social-realist study of life in a slum tenement in New York during the depression era into an opera. Later he was to say, “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.”
Although Rice was fiercely protective of his material, Weill succeeded in allaying his suspicions (Rice had already turned down other offers to ‘compose’ his play). Weill’s rendering remains faithful in most respects to the original, including extensive passages of dialogue adapted from the play. The black poet Langston Hughes, who provided the lyrics, escorted Weill through sections of Harlem so that he could imbibe the legitimate atmosphere of that world. After tryouts in Philadelphia, the show reached the Adelphi Theatre in New York, premiering on
January 9, 1947. The cast, as befitting a ‘mixed-genre’ piece, was comprised of both Broadway and operatic performers.
Street Scene captures the disillusionment and bitterness precipitated by the catastrophe of the depression and yet, somehow, also the resilience of the human spirit in search of redemption from a lost life.
—David Walsh |
