A new interpretation of “Street Scene”, a seminal dramatic musical

By B.T. | LEEDS

AT FIRST IT seems as if nothing much will happen on this sultry night in a poor Manhattan neighbourhood. In “Street Scene”, Kurt Weill’s “Broadway opera”, a large, shifting cast of characters—the immigrants, the misfits, the wannabes—play (and sing) out their hopes and fears on a spiralling three-storey network of staircases and balconies designed to evoke a tenement block. But as morning follows night over this work’s 24-hour time-frame, the drama quickens. Growling tensions of poverty, prejudice and exclusion rise into the roar of a plot that takes in forbidden love, adulterous passion, murder and remorse.

First performed on Broadway in 1947, “Street Scene” is an American masterpiece that—perhaps because of its sprawling, unwieldy cast—has never quite won the secure place in the repertoire that it merits. Elmer Rice had written the original play in 1929; for his musical adaptation, Weill worked with song lyrics deftly crafted by the African-American poet Langston Hughes. Together, they won the first Tony Award for Best Original Score in 1947.