Street Scene

Disability Accommodations

For disability accommodations, please contact the department presenting the event. Disability access information is available online at Parking Services, and further resources can be found by contacting Western's Disability Access Center.

Music by Kurt Weill

Lyrics by Langston Hughes

Book by Elmer Rice

 

Director

Heather Dudenbostel

Music Director

Mark Davies

Conductor

Ryan Dudenbostel

About the production

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.