Street Scene - UMD Theatre

Street Scene Opera is Performed Well at UMD

 Lawrance Bernabo 

April 30, 2015 

Bringing together different artistic companies has become a recurrent theme this season, and UMD jumped on the bandwagon with the Departments of Music and Theatre combining to present the American Opera Street Scene on Thursday night. Adapted from Elmer Rice’s play of the same name with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Langston Hughes this is an ambitious work, well executed.

Rice’s setting is an apartment building in Hell’s Kitchen, where the accents run the gamut from Betty Boop to Bowery Boys with an ethnic smorgasbord in between. What starts off like just another day in the life of this East Side tenement ends up encompassing birth and death. Those expecting something similar to The Threepenny Opera will find elements of that, especially with “Lullaby,” which opens the final scene. But early on Weill is more into exploring jazz idioms, reminiscent of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, while at other times the music is more evocative of Puccini. Then we get to “Wrapped in a Ribbon” and suddenly Weill is producing songs that could have been popular songs at the turn of the century from an Edison cylinder.

In a musical, characters sporadically burst into song. In Street Scene what happens is more like shifting into a higher gear. That is what happens when Amanda Bush’s Anna Maurrant launches into “Somehow I Never Could Believe.” Singing of an optimistic belief in a future that seems doomed to be crushed before the final curtain falls, Bush provided a textbook example of what a dramatic soprano can do with a powerful aria.

 Something similar happens when Zach Winkler as Sam Kaplan begins singing “Lonely House.” Winkler has a nice tone in his lower register that grounds his character’s pathos to the grim realities of his situation.

Sam wants to be more than friends with Anna’s daughter, Rose. Anna Torgerson’s “What Good Would the Moon Be?” speaks to the limitation of romantic dreams in the face of reality. The reprise of this number could be more poignant with some darker shadings given what happens in between because it really is not the same song at that point.

 Everything comes full circle in the end of Street Scene and life goes on in one way or another. One thing I admired about this show is how much time it devotes to the aftermath of the tragedy that unfolds. Usually in an opera that is the final scene, but this show is more ambitious.

 There are even more musicians in the pit under the baton of conductor Jean R. Perrault than there are running around on stage. That big of an orchestra combined with the acoustics of the Mainstage Theatre sounds wonderful, and the sound mix with the singers also was excellent for most of the evening.

 There is a recurring comic thread throughout, personified by “The Ice Cream Sextet,” which was done with seven people on stage and one of the chief examples of the ways director Alice Pierce worked humor into the proceedings.  There are lots of little fun bits sprinkled throughout the show, most of which I liked far better than the running gag with the dog, which really cut against the grain of the tragic dramas played out in this opera.