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Overall Opera North did this rare piece, which shows Weill on wonderful form, to a very high standard
Stephanie Corley as Susan Cooper with the Chorus and Orchestra of Opera North (Photo: James Glossop)
Over the years, of all the UK’s companies Opera North has demonstrated the most consistent commitment to performing musicals. Kurt Weill has been a particular focus, partly due to the expertise in this composer’s work of the Leeds-based enterprise’s former music director, James Holmes.
Over the decades he has helmed several Weill shows for Opera North: One Touch of Venus, Arms and the Cow, Street Scene and The Seven Deadly Sins, and now the 1948 ‘vaudeville’ Love Life; this show, indeed, has a particular association with the company, which gave it its European premiere back in 1996.
On this occasion Matthew Eberhardt’s concert staging provided an opportunity for a live recording to be made of this rarity over the course of its short run. Love Life did well on Broadway back in 1948, clocking up a total of 252 performances – yet surprisingly little has been heard of it since. It proved to be Weill’s sole collaboration with Alan Jay Lerner, who had already made his name with Brigadoon, composed by Frederick Loewe, and would go on to work with the latter again on Gigi, My Fair Lady and Camelot: one of Lerner’s lyrics for Love Life was indeed revised (and became famous) in Gigi as ‘I remember it well’.
In Opera North’s finely crafted staging of the Weill piece, skilfully directed by Eberhardt and cleverly designed by Zahra Mansouri with choreography by Will Tuckett (especially finely achieved by dancers Holly Saw and Max Westwell in the second act ‘Divorce Ballet’), the ‘recollections may vary’ duet was sung by married couple Sam (Quirijn de Lang) and Susan (Stephanie Corley), whose unusual story is told in Lerner’s Book and lyrics.
Following a brief prologue involving a magician – the first of a series of vaudeville turns that punctuate the main narrative — the latter begins in 1791 in rural Mayville, where Sam and Susan, together with their children Johnny (Louie Stow) and Elizabeth (Tilly Baker), open a furniture store.
Felicity Moore as a Tot (Photo: James Glossop)
Though these four characters never age, we later see them in changing contexts in American history right up to 1948, the year of Love Life’s premiere, and in both good times and bad: marriage, and its ability to (maybe) survive, is the subject.
The four central performances are terrific, though the complexity and length of the material are drawbacks. But overall Opera North did this rare piece, which shows Weill on wonderful form, to a very high standard. It may not ever renew its initial success, but it proved well worth encountering.
