Kurt Weill's 1947 stage musical +Street Scene is one of those works, like George Gershwin's +Porgy and Bess 12 years earlier, that was mounted as a Broadway show, but since has been claimed, to one extent or another, as a 20th century opera. Gershwin called his work a "folk opera," and although Weill initially insisted his was a Broadway musical, it might be dubbed an "urban folk opera," since, unlike +Porgy and Bess, it is set in a city tenement. Elmer Rice's 1929 play, which he adapted for the musical's libretto (with lyrics by Langston Hughes), is a portrait of lower class life among first- and second-generation immigrants thrown together in connected apartment houses, Irish interacting with Jews, African-Americans, Poles, and others, gossiping, cooking, playing, going off to work and school and coming home, flirting, fighting, and dreaming of a better life. There is birth and death, and there is young love that faces challenges. It is a sprawling work in a style that, in a later theater era, was known as "kitchen sink drama" ("melodrama" also applies). In Weill's hands, it is at least semi-operatic. His music calls for trained voices, and although there are recognizable songs in popular styles here and there, much of it does answer to the description of "opera," as opposed to "musical comedy" or even "operetta." The original production ran only 148 performances, which made it a commercial failure as a Broadway musical. But Columbia Records recorded a cast album, lavish for the time, that immortalized at least its major songs, and by the '70s it was being taken up by opera companies. Curiously, two companies in Great Britain mounted versions in the same year, 1989, the Scottish Opera in Glasgow and the English National Opera in London. This album, recorded in August 1989 and March 1990, is only the second one ever done. (Or, it might be considered the third, since the London production actually was recorded in between, in October and November 1989 just after the opening, but not released until later.) It is not billed as the cast album of the Glasgow production, but as a studio cast album, perhaps because there have been changes in the cast from the stage version. In any case, it sounds as if it had been recorded on a stage instead of in a recording studio, with the miking distant from the performers to allow for the extreme volume range between unaccompanied dialogue segments and full orchestral passages. Annotator William Thornhill calls it the "first complete recording," and it is, in that it contains all the dialogue as well as the music, for a running time close to two-and-a-half hours, which is more than an hour-and-a-half longer than the Broadway cast album. The credits include a dialogue coach, who must have had a complicated task bringing out all the ethnic accents. The cast sings well, particularly the leads, Josephine Barstow as the doomed adulteress Mrs. Maurant; Sam Ramey as her bass-voiced husband and murderer; Angelina Réaux as her love-struck but conflicted daughter Rose; and Jerry Hadley as Rose's tenor-voiced love interest, Sam Kaplan. John Mauceri, conducting the Scottish Opera Orchestra Chorus, plays down the pop aspects of the score. Wouldn't You Like to Be on Broadway?, an unabashed show tune, is still in the score, as is the swing number Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed, but neither is performed with any particular flair. This is a heavy treatment of the work, intended to claim it for the classical realm. Mauceri, unlike Thornhill, puts quotation marks around the word "opera" the first time he uses it in his liner notes. But his interpretation is intended to remove them, which is perhaps just as well. It's hard to imagine +Street Scene being reclaimed for the commercial theater. ~ William Ruhlmann, Rovi

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