This Day in Theater History (Weill’s Musical/Opera ‘Street Scene’ Closes)

May 17, 1947—After 148 performances, Kurt Weill’s Street Scene closed at New York’s Adelphi Theatre, but what remained open was the question of whether the composer of The Threepenny Opera had created a musical, an opera, or some hybrid of the two.

Up to that time, the closest analogue to Weill’s work was the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, and though it exceeded the number of performances for that earlier controversial work, Street Scene still was judged a commercial, though not artistic, failure. 

The producers of Weill’s later collaboration with Maxwell Anderson, Lost in the Stars, would term that work “A Musical Tragedy,” but it could have applied with equal, perhaps even greater justice, to the adaptation of Elmer Rice’s searing 1929 drama.

For all the great talents involved (Rice wrote the book; poet Langston Hughes, the lyrics), this piece of musical theater, about the grinding poverty and despair that fuel a love triangle on New York's Lower East Side, offered little comfort to audiences craving good cheer after defeating Fascism and facing a prolonged, uncertain struggle against a recent ally.

I saw this work not on Broadway, but in what was probably a more congenial setting: the opera stage—specifically, New York City Opera, in 1979, when my college music humanities class made a field trip to that Lincoln Center institution.

Like many in my class, I had not only never heard of a Weill song aside from cover versions of “Mack the Knife” and “The Alabama Song” by, respectively, Bobby Darin and The Doors, but had never even seen an opera to that point. 

In many ways, this particular one—including an English-language text and lyrics that could be understood with little, if any difficulty, not to mention at least a few hummable, even toe-tapping tunes that could have come right out of Tin Pan Alley—was atypical of such fare. But it did broaden our understanding of what the genre could be.

That question has come to the fore repeatedly over the years. Not only have recordings of landmark musicals sometimes featured opera stars (West Side Story, My Fair Lady), but several musicals have found their way into opera repertory companies, including Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella and Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. 

The battle over this was joined even more forcefully this year, as the estate of George and Ira Gershwin authorized cuts and other alterations to Porgy and Bess destined to make it more compatible with the musical genre than opera.

For Street Scene, Weill—who had fled Nazi Germany with wife Lotte Lenya in 1933—brought to bear elements of what he termed “Broadway opera.” Appropriately enough for a stage property set in a polyglot culture, Street Scene includes elements of Broadway, jazz, blues, and Puccini-esque idioms.   

When Weill died three years later, fellow composer Virgil Thomson hailed him, in one of his music columns, as "the most original single workman in the whole musical theater, internationally considered, during the last quarter century... Every work was a new model, a new shape, a new solution to dramatic problems." 

It’s a shame Weill did not live long enough to complete the project on which he was concentrating at the time of his death: an adaptation of another property about class and racial-ethnic conflict in America: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Since his death, Street Scene has been mounted more often as an opera instead of a musical. (See, for instance, this YouTube clip of a 1989 performance of its showstopper tune, "Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed," from the English National Opera.)