Street Scene, Opera North, review: an unfussy and sympathetic production – shame Kurt Weill’s opera is a snooze

Never one to duck a challenge, Opera North has tried very hard over the years to promote the stage works of Kurt Weill, mounting productions of The Threepenny Opera, Der Kuhhandel and The Seven Deadly Sins from his European years, as well as Love Life and One Touch of Venus from his American exile. With Street Scene, they may have reached the end of the road.

Although it has been respectfully revived several times since its New York première in 1947, this is a piece that remains hobbled by a plot that never rises above cliché and a score that fluctuates awkwardly between the idioms of Berlin cabaret, Viennese operetta, Broadway musical and Hollywood B-picture, yielding only one standout number along the way: the melancholy Lonely House, beautifully sung here by Alex Banfield.

As is evident from the rich colours in the orchestral writing, Weill had a vastly more sophisticated technique than George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers, to name two points of contemporary comparison. But their masterpieces Porgy and Bess and Carousel wipe the floor with Street Scene in terms of both memorable melody and emotional impact.

The libretto is drawn from a play by Elmer Rice, dating from 1929 and set outside a Manhattan tenement block inhabited by a melting pot of immigrants who chatter, kvetch, quarrel and go about the ordinary business of life. An unhappily married couple, the Maurrants, come to grief; there’s a fragile young love between the sweet Irish Rose and the earnest Jewish intellectual Sam.