ICSM Online Journal > Reviews

Reviewed by Michael Eagleton
posted October 19, 2009

Once a year, the Mid-Saxony Theatre decamps from its base in Freiberg, claimed to be the oldest working theatre in Germany – and certainly one of the smallest – across the Square into the Nikolaikirche, for a ‘festival-style’ production. This year the work chosen for this special treatment was Kurt Weill’s ‘American Opera’ Street Scene, for which he worked with Elmer Rice and Langston Hughes and which ran on Broadway from January to May 1948.

The Nikolaikirche was stripped bare in GDR days and is now used as a concert hall, with a small stage at the east end on which the frontage of a New York brownstone tenement stood. It seemed a little premature to see black drapes and a large photograph of Anna Maurrant in the window – she is not murdered until well into Act II – and somewhat dispiriting for the audience to be expected to stand while a funeral procession made its way from the west door, with the conductor, Jan Michael Horstmann, walking backwards directing an a cappella pot-pourri, presumably of his own devising, of numbers from the show. Weill’s opening bars, with a typical ‘sit-up-and-take-notice’ strident discord, tells us just what we need to know about the tensions, and the bustle, of a heat-wave stricken city street. So in my view Director Manuel Schöbel badly miscalculated here, but he is forgiven for what followed. For when echt-Weill began, the black disappeared, lines of washing suddenly appeared strung out across the nave, and the chattering voices of the tenement blocks’ inhabitants rang out from the galleries on each side, an antiphonal ‘Ain’t it Awful, the Heat’ and ‘Get a Load of That’. Henry Davis, the Janitor, arrived on his bicycle along the length of the aisle, as did Lippo Fiorentino with his Ice Cream cart with a bit of audience participation on the way. Sung by Klaus Kühl, a veteran of the ensemble, he led off the Ice Cream sextet with real panache, and who can blame the whole ensemble from joining in at the end of what is surely one of Weill’s most joyous numbers?

One might quibble about some of the detail: Anna Maurant (a sympathetic Katherina Wingen) clutching a wedding photograph during ‘Somehow I never could believe’ rather laboured the point, and I’m not sure that Anna’s surreptitious meeting with her lover, Sankey, should have been viewed through a pair of binoculars. But later, there was real tension when Frank Maurant (the suitably morose but rather dry baritone of Juhapekka Sainio), returning from work early, sees Sankey’s milk float parked in the middle of the audience and strides towards his apartment amid shouts of warning to his errant wife upstairs. The young lovers, Rose and Sam, were a perfectly contrasted Esther Hilsberg and Angelo Raciti, and the jitterbugging pair of Dick McGann and Mae Jones, John Holman and Kristi Esch, made as much of ‘Moon Faced, Starry Eyed’ as space allowed. Harry Easter, the sleazy would-be seducer of Rose, was pleasantly sung by Sergio Raonic Lukovic, but needed more practice with his bowler hat routine.

Jan Michael Horstmann conducted in a sure Broadway style – with verve, but with considerable attention to detail – especially from his woodwind soloists. The show used the German translation by that true Weill champion Lys Symonette (her husband, Randolph, was a Policeman in the original Broadway show), which retains key lyrics in English. I’m sure she would have thoroughly approved of an evening that may not have been perfect, but hugely enjoyable.

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