WWU: Street Scene
$22 ($12 student)
The departments of Music and Theatre & Dance present the American opera Street Scene with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Langston Hughes and will feature the Western Symphony Orchestra.
Kurt Weill conceived of Street Scene as a groundbreaking synthesis of European traditional opera and American musical theater. Musically and culturally, even dramatically, the work inhabits the mid-ground between Weill's Threepenny Opera (1928) and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (1957). Weill received the inaugural Tony Award for Best Original Score for his work, after the Broadway premiere in 1947.
At the heart of the tale is the Maurrant family whose tragic story is contrasted throughout the opera with moments of humor, joy, and hope.
Based on Elmer Rice's Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name, the plot centers around the conflicts and entanglements between residents of a New York City tenement building in the heat of summer in the 1940s.