Street Scene (opera)

Street Scene (opera)

Street Scene is a Broadway musical or, more precisely, an "American opera" by Kurt Weill (music), Langston Hughes (lyrics), and Elmer Rice (book). Written in 1946 and premiered in Philadelphia that year, Street Scene is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name by Rice.

It was Weill who referred to the piece as an "American opera" (he also called it a "Broadway opera"), intending it as a synthesis of European traditional opera and American musical theater. He received the first Tony Award for Best Original Score for his work, after the Broadway premiere in 1947. Yet Street Scene has never been revived on Broadway; it is fairly regularly produced by opera companies. Musically and culturally, even dramatically, the work inhabits the midground between Weill's Threepenny Opera (1928) and Bernstein's West Side Story (1957).

The score contains operatic arias and ensembles, some of them, such as Anna Maurrant's "Somehow I Never Could Believe" and Frank Maurrant's "Let Things Be Like They Always Was," with links and references to the style of Giacomo Puccini. It also has jazz and blues influences, in "I Got a Marble and a Star" and "Lonely House." Some of the more Broadway-style musical numbers are "Wrapped In a Ribbon and Tied In a Bow", "Wouldn't You Like To Be On Broadway?" and "Moon-faced, Starry-eyed," an extended song-and-dance sequence.