Theatre review: Street Scene

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh ***

FIRST seen in Philadelphia in 1946, Kurt Weill’s American opera Street Scene – based on the 1929 play by Elmer Rice – was part of a powerful mid-20th-century movement designed to dramatise the lives of working-class people, and to challenge the idea that tragedy always involves stories of “great men”, princes and kings.

Street Scene is a powerful tale of a family destroyed by a middle-aged woman’s yearning for love, by her husband’s brutal coldness, and by the doomed affair with another man that brings disaster, in the tight, densely-populated community of a Lower East Side street.

When this Young Vic/Opera Group co-production – briefly in Edinburgh at the weekend – opened in London in 2008, John Fulljames’s staging was hailed as one of the finest musical productions of the year, an intense and good-looking affair staged on an open scaffolding set, with a 20-strong onstage orchestra. At this distance, it’s difficult to share such overwhelming enthusiasm; unlike Gershwin’s Porgy And Bess, Weill’s score seems to struggle a little to combine its jazz-age preoccupations with a classical singing style, and with Broadway musical conventions.

This is a fine story, though, told with great commitment and energy by a cast which includes a large, impressive chorus of local children; and Elena Ferrari’s beautiful central performance as Anna, the housewife and mother with the soaring romantic soul, offers some magnificent moments, as she delivers the finest songs in Weill’s score, with a passion that sears the heart.