WHEN asked to describe what exactly Street Scene is, director John Fulljames doesn't hesitate.

“It’s a Broadway opera, one of the very few ever written. It’s a story about love, a story about a murder. It’s a modernist masterpiece, one of the great operas of the 20th century.”

Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, originally mounted in the 1920s, was given a jazzed-up musical treatment by legendary songwriter Kurt Weill and lyricist and poet Langston Hughes and brought into post-war 1940s America. Produced in Scotland in the 1980s, getting a sell-out, award-winning run in 2008, and now back for an extended tour with the celebrated team at The Opera Group, Street Scene is a show with a past.

Coming to Edinburgh, at the Festival Theatre, is a culmination of two years’ experience from the previous mini tour and Fulljames feels the show is better than ever, with minimal tweaks and changes. “I think there’s nothing worse than reviving something and just doing it again, remaking it. This time I think it’s far more detailed, far more comic.”

Comic in parts, but don’t expect a laugh a minute. You’re not meant to be rolling in the aisles. Street Scene is exactly that, a snippet of a street scene, a tenement building and its inhabitants going about their daily lives in the midst of a New York heatwave. The characters that gave rise to the stereotypes are there, but it’s not two-dimensional. There’s an Italian ice cream man, a Swedish mother, a hard-spun Brooklyn busybody who tells it like ought to be. There’s an electrifying dance sequence. And it’s an opera.

But don’t let that scare you -- Fulljames is a great promoter of accessible opera and is at pains to emphasise the play’s broad appeal. “It’s written in a very populist vein, it’s written to be topical. There’s extraordinary music at it’s core, and big emotion. It’s a challenge to leave the auditorium and not be moved by it.”

Upon viewing Street Scene, it’s easier to class it in the generic musical genre, though that doesn’t really fit the bill either. But if opera brings up images of breastplates and horn helmets, then bedraggled housewives putting out their laundry and scolding their children isn’t exactly Wagnerian. So what makes Street Scene opera, exactly?

“It’s vast. It’s a big show. Big orchestra, big cast. Good opera is when the performances are taut, it’s dramatically coherent and the music is well performed. It’s a very simple story, but it’s a very emotional story. There’s melodrama, and I think opera encapsulates those very big emotions.”

It’s still an incongruous pairing. Classic American characters in classical American situations in 1940s New York meet reverberating contraltos and tenors, clashing cymbals, rolling drums and rich, symphonic accompaniment. Strange bedfellows, but it works. The music is at times breathtaking, at others toe-tapping, but always stunning. This is where maestro Kurt Weill and his magic wand come in. Famous for his scores as he worked with notables like Brecht, Moss Hart, Gershwin and Alan Jay Lerner, Weill’s contribution to Street Scene revitalised the play for a new generation.

So would Street Scene be a hit without Kurt Weill’s music? Fulljames is doubtful. Though Rice’s original play was a hit (and won the aforementioned Pulitzer), “it probably would have remained of its time. There’s something about Weill’s music which turns it into a classic, which turns it into the sort of music which should be revived now.” Weill’s contribution to 20th-century music isn’t in doubt. Who among us hasn’t hummed Mack The Knife at one time or another?

The collaboration with poet Langston Hughes makes for some similarly hummable tunes, a standout being the cheery Wrapped in a Ribbon and Tied in A Bow.

“The music makes the show. The reason it will carry on being played again and again is that the music encapsulates the 20th century. The story of America is in the music. There’s some opera, some jazz, some 1930s dancehall and 1950s swing. The whole thing is the 20th century in sound.”

Easily one of the most impressive aspects of this realisation of Street Scene is the onstage presence of the Southbank Sinfonia atmospherically blasting away. Fulljames says the decision behind this was simple. “We decided to put the orchestra up centre so that the sound of Weill’s orchestra is the thing that evokes the places, which evokes the house.” The soundscape for Street Scene is impressive. The establishment of mood and feeling of the locale and the characters is as much established by the music and sound effects as the crowded, cut-away tenement. “The show is about the street, the city, and I think what Weill was doing, amazingly, was capturing in music this quality of the city.”

And what about the play itself? There’s the cheeriness that facilitates easy breaking into song, but there’s a bleakness of the play, not least because of a deep sense of foreboding about certain characters’ relationships. Fulljames says the story is as much about a place as the people in it. “It’s about the way the place you live in can dehumanise you. [The play] allows us to connect with those people as human beings and understand where they’re coming from, and this through where they live out most of their lives.”

Indeed there is a palpable feeling in Street Scene when characters emerge onto the thrust and out beyond offstage that they are really escaping something, and there’s a real heart-tightening disappointment when they inevitably return. Each of the characters has a “will she or won’t she” moment, and it’s easy to fall into their restricted, stunted lives. The young lovers, the old lovers, the menacing bully, the winsome housewife, the ghoulish looky-loos all weave in and out of the grim exposed brick -- and you feel for them. But Street Scene is not all doom and gloom; it’s heightened joy, heightened laughter, heightened fear, heightened love -- the melodrama Fulljames spoke of.

He helmed the 2008 production, again with The Opera Group, and now has taken on a position with The Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Taking his place at the horns and helm of The Opera Group is Frederick Wake-Walker, the Edinburgh-educated director of operas at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and Scottish Opera. But Fulljames is staying on to collaborate on a few new projects for 2012 and 2013.

He says he hopes the legacy of Street Scene is that “people who saw the show will leave the theatre somehow changed and taking a piece of Street Scene with them. If that’s humming a tune or shedding a tear, or coming back to see another Opera Group show, that would be a very good legacy. And that the show itself tours around the world”.

 

Street Scene is at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, tomorrow and Saturday.