Street Scene

Weill’s score did not yield any hits like his The Threepenny Opera with ‘Mack the Knife’, or Knickerbocker Holiday with ‘September Song’, but it does have some haunting melodies - Mrs Maurrant’s ‘Somehow I Never Could Believe’, her daughter’s romantic lament ‘What Good Would the Moon Be’ and the horror-stricken chorale ‘The Woman Who Lived Up There’.

Director Michael Gow and his production team decided to keep the piece in the forties, a wise choice. An uneasy mix of Broadway and opera, it doesn’t always work (some things jar), but it’s never less than interesting and sometimes all-consuming.

It’s an ambitious project for this group of students who were not always equipped vocally to meet the demands of the music, not helped by an indifferent sound mix. Unfortunately poet Langston Hughes’ fine lyrics were sometimes lost.

Adam Gardnir’s imposing many-leveled set, with its multiple stairways, tenement facades with windows and doors that open, a dining room and stoop, clearly defines the action and era. Elmer Rice’s drama looks at a hot summer’s day in a New York immigrant ghetto with a mix of characters; the gossips, the woman cheating behind her husband’s back, the woman in labor, teenage sweethearts with big dreams, the good-time girl and her boyfriend, and the brutish husband who escalates the drama into murder.

We’ve seen it all before in every TV soap-opera, and the milieu is not unlike In the Heights, but it has the feel of authenticity.

Tom Nicholson, as the villain of the piece, the damaged and abusive husband Frank, was a roaring vocal force whose moving finale ‘I Loved Her Too’ captured the dignity of a cuckolded man, as did Lucy Stoddart as the teenage daughter Rose, whose ‘What Good Would The Moon Be?’ was etched with pathos.

The work came alive with the obvious Broadway pieces, with Camilo Lopez as Harry Easter nailing the song-and-dance ‘Wouldn’t You Like To be On Broadway’ and Sophia Mortensen, Caitlin Weal, and Alla Yarosh being a fine trio of gossips in ‘Get a Load of That’. But the hit of the night was Sean Johnston (Dick) and Carla Beard (Mae), on loan from Griffith Musical Theatre and previously seen in Grease as Danny and Sonny, in the full swing/boogie-woogie ‘Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed’. It was like a Rogers and Astaire routine dancing over balustrades and up and down stairs executed with great skill.

Like Bernstein, Weill always orchestrated his own work, and the pit musicians were in fine form under Johannes Fritzsch, playing this ominous, dissonant, and lovely score.

Bravo to Queensland Conservatorium for mounting this rarified Broadway opera with such style.

Peter Pinne

Images: Courtesy of Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University. Photography by Justin Ma.