|
|
 |
| |
Summer time, but the living sure ain’t easy...
STREET SCENE
Young Vic
STREET Scene presents a raw, rough, working-class New York city. Elma Rice won the Pullitzer Prize after it opened as a play in 1929.
Set in the traditional brownstone house, it captured the lives of six families, living in the steaming and poverty-ridden lower east side.
It is the time of the Depression and there is a fierce heatwave.
There is no air conditioning in the “walk up, cold water” apartments, so the inhabitants sit around seeking relief by gossiping on the stoop.
A sense of violent tragedy is in the air.
German composer Kurt Weill’s work in Street Scene ranges from lyrical operatic, to harsh, stark, clashing, menacing sound.
There are 21 songs in the two and a half hour show. Everybody gets to sing.
Opera Group and director John Fulljames have evoked 365 West 56th Street as a model for Rice’s original play. They opened in 1947 in New York.
The Maurrant family are the doomed ones when death comes calling. Frank is a hard-hat Archie Bunker type, while Anna craves affection and finds it, with sad consequences, with the milkman.
Their daughter Rose is a fragile flower in this overgrown garden.
Andrew Slater is the brute force, Frank, while Elena Ferrari is the doomed wife.
Ferrari has a voice of operatic tenderness and her murder by husband Frank really does shock.
Old Abraham Kaplan yells about the evils of capitalism, while his studious son Sam yearns for Rose. There is no sentimentality in these people’s lives. Only “death, birth and eviction”.
Rice had watched New York closely, even the particular ritual of street games. At the Young Vic they were rigorously re-enacted by local children.
A fine evening’s entertainment, which surely deserves a West End season if only to inspire our home-grown writers and musicians to show our contemporary urban blight.
A warm salute to the Young Vic.
Run complete
020 7485 9897 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
