*****
WHAT a wonderful production this is. Kurt Weill's little performed Street Scene, his 'Broadway opera', is the perfect 'student' piece of musical theatre, mainly because of the large number of characters and the tightly focused narrative. But is is also jaw-droppingly hard to sing at points: it is not a whistle-a-long Christmas Lloyd Webber musical, but a carefully constructed piece of stage craft, with a driving and complex orchestration.
It is like a condensed soap opera...
One has to say at the outset that the RNCM students have performed two of the musical highlights of my classical year – their Mahler 2 to open the revamped concert hall in March was overwhelmingly good, and the Krzysztof Penderecki concert at the Bridgewater Hall was stunning. This is up there with them.
The cast are uniformly excellent (apart from some unintentional Keystone Cops moments), and the leads avoid one of the pitfalls of student productions in that they largely manage to convince as the older, downtrodden characters. The range of accents – 'Oi, de moiders!', 'You Joimens are different', 'We'll sham-poo yoir head with a brick if ya don't' – in the cast are also excellent and arrayed to good comic effect (including on the surtitles), allowing the immigrant experience in 1940s New York to shine through. Among the many excellent cast members, Aidan Edwards and Katie Loew, who play the Maurrant couple, are spellbinding. Edwards brings to Frank an imposing, glowering presence and Loew plays Anna as a woman balancing on an edge – finely nuanced between her loveless marriage and the flirtation with the unsuspecting milk collection man.
Come to think of it, most of the cast are balancing on some sort of edge. The opera is set in a single tenement block, and each family are facing some sort of crisis – imminent birth, eviction, marital strife. It is like a condensed soap opera, but it is never hackneyed. And the set, a framework of the block into the which the audience can see each room, is, as ever with RNCM productions, pretty much perfect.
It's an opera, so yes, some one dies. But you can feel the tension rise with the gossiping women and men, the darkening tones of the strings as the threat increases. What makes this more than just a 'tragic opera' though is Weill's playfulness. Apart from some witty pastiche, there is some wonderful syncopated jazz (and dancing), a rainbow of orhcestral colours and effects, and a couple of completely unexpected comedic interludes ... 'Hush baby hush, your daddy is a lush' was one favourite couplet.
So – kudos to cast, crew and orchestra: an accomplished work indeed.
Street Scene played the RNCM on Friday 4 December
