March 20, 2008 issue
Opera in the High Country
ASU Produces American Opera Street Scene April 3 to 6
Story by Anna Oakes
Although the High Country is fortunate to have a rich diversity of entertainment and cultural offerings, high art and large-scale productions are almost always confined to the metropolitan areas. Count opera among them.
But thanks to Appalachian State University and the Hayes Performing Arts Center, opera comes to the High Country at least once a year. On Thursday through Sunday, April 3 to 6, ASU Opera presents Kurt Weill’s American opera Street Scene at the Hayes Center.
Evening performances are at 8:00 p.m. Thursday to Saturday and a Sunday matinee takes place at 2:00 p.m.
Weill, a German composer, selected Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Street Scene, for an exploration of what he called “new musical theater.” He enlisted renowned poet Langston Hughes to write the lyrics, and Street Scene the musical premiered in 1947.
Set on the doorstep of a housing estate in New York’s East Side on one hot spring day in 1946, the story deals with the ordinary squabbles and gossip of neighbors. The mounting tensions between the irritable characters eventually build into a tragedy of epic proportions.
For his work, Weill was awarded the first Tony Award for Best Original Score in 1947.
“Kurt Weill’s intention was to compose a piece that bridged the gap between musical theater and opera,” said Randall Outland, producer and director of ASU Opera’s Street Scene performance.
Elements such as dance numbers and dialogue are more related to musicals, but some of the solos and other pieces are very operatic, Outland added.
About 30 students are currently enrolled in Outland’s opera workshop class at ASU, open to anyone on campus. The cast and production staff of Street Scene include opera workshop students, as well as other students and community members.
Street Scene features around 20 cast roles, with some roles double-cast, Outland said.
The role of Frank Maurrant, a violent, disagreeable brute with bass or baritone voice, is played by Adam Bowers and David Clark. His wife, Anna Maurrant, is a soprano voice filled by Rachel Hall and Kate Edahl, with Heather Vick serving as understudy.
Anna Eschbach and Tara Nixon play Rose Maurrant, the teenager daughter and soprano. Sam Kaplan, a tenor voice who is in love with Rose, is played by Tyler Young.
Because of space confinements, the orchestra was reduced from 24 instruments to 18, Outland said. The music of Street Scene features elements of jazz, 20th century European harmonies, blues and “sweeping, beautiful operatic lines,” he said. James Anderson conducts the orchestra.
Tickets are $18 for adults and $9 for students. The Hayes Performing Arts Center is located at 152 Jamie Fort Road off U.S. Highway 321 in Blowing Rock. For more information, call 828-295-9627.
Want To Go?
Date: Thursday to Sunday, April 3 to 6
Time: 8:00 p.m. Thursday to Saturday/2:00 p.m. Sunday
Location: Hayes Center, Blowing Rock
Cost: $18 adults/$9 students
Street Scene: The Composer, Playwright and Lyricist
Street Scene the opera is the product of three diverse artists: composer Kurt Weill, playwright Elmer Rice and lyricist Langston Hughes.
Weill, born in 1900, was a German Jew who fled Nazi Germany in 1933, eventually settling in the state of New York. Before his death in 1950, Weill composed numerous theatre and concert works. His best known work is The Threepenny Opera, a reworking of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera written in collaboration with Bertolt Brecht and featuring Weill’s most famous song, “Mack the Knife.”
About Street Scene, Weill wrote, “It was a simple story of everyday life in a big city, a story of love and passion and greed and death. I saw great musical possibilities in its theatrical device—life in a tenement house between one evening and the next afternoon. And it seemed like a great challenge to me to find the inherent poetry in these people and to blend my music with the stark realism of the play.”
Born in New York City in 1892, Rice had a brief legal career before turning to writing. His first play, On Trial, was the first American stage production to employ the flashback technique used by films. Rice published Street Scene, the play on which Weill’s musical is based, in 1929 and received the Pulitzer Prize for its realistic chronicle of life in the slums.
Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. He was raised for a good portion of his childhood by his grandmother, whose storytelling instilled in Hughes a lifelong sense of racial pride. Hughes published more than 10 books of poetry, a dozen books of prose and several plays; his works include the well known poem “A Dream Deferred.”
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