Beguiled by Weill

Street Scene may well be Kurt Weill’s most successful work from his American period, but seeing it in as good a production as the Opera Group’s at the Young Vic was cause for both enjoyment and reservations. In the next couple of weeks it will be touring to Basingstoke, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Hull, so plenty of people will have and should take the chance of seeing it. I’d go again if I were nearer one of those places, for Weill is always at least interesting, though not always quite in the way that he wanted to be — he intended, like Brecht, that we should be filled with indignation about many of the scenes he presents, but we’re much more likely to be beguiled by catchy melodies. Elmer Rice and Langston Hughes, the rather leaden librettists of Street Scene, only intermittently led Weill to bring characters to life, or to create atmosphere.

The work begins and ends with complaints about the heat — actually, the Young Vic was extremely well air-conditioned — but nothing in the music or the action gets that across. The impressions of tenement life are more of a swarming ant-heap. Still, the performance was on a decent to high level, the unquestioned star being Elena Ferrari as Anna Maurrant, an adorable middle-aged woman married to a slob and tempted into an affair with Sankey the milkman; the slob murders them both. The pervasive feeling is one of longing to get out to something better, most movingly realised by the bookish Sam Kaplan, played here with heroic lack of sex appeal by Paul Curievici, whose relationship with Anna’s daughter Rose comes close to being the work’s centre. I don’t know how to put my frustration precisely, and I don’t think it was the production’s fault.