Weill’s Broadway opera ‘Street Scene’ shows the endurance of American stereotypes

“Let things be like they always was. That’s good enough for me. Let things again be safe and sound. . . . Look at all these newfangled ideas going round: free love, divorce, and birth control. . . . In the old days they didn’t carry on that way.”

The rhetoric sounds fresh in today’s America, but the lines are from 1946, and they were written by an African American. Kurt Weill’s “Street Scene,” with lyrics by Langston Hughes and book by Elmer Rice, came to Fairfax this weekend with the Virginia Opera. It served as another example, along with the 1946 play “Born Yesterday” now at Ford’s Theatre, that even the most dated works from the middle of the last century point out American patterns we haven’t yet managed to break.