REVIEW: Street Scene at The Anvil (From Basingstoke Gazette)

REVIEW: Street Scene at The Anvil

1:56pm Thursday 6th October 2011 in Theatre By Joanne Mace

IT WAS a great coup for The Anvil to play host to John Fulljames’s Young Vic / Opera Group co-production of Kurt Weill’s opera, one of only five venues on its tour of the country.

For the Basingstoke performance, 16 pupils of Kempshott Junior School added to the cast, as did five older chorus members from Stax theatre group, and they made a great impression – you would never have known that they hadn’t been part of it all along.

The drama took place on precisely what its title indicated, the set representing the front steps of a New York tenement block inhabited by family groups of various ethnicities. All hilariously in each other’s business, the stuff of life was here, birth and the inevitable death, in addition to sex, romance, racism and a whole other whirl of things to think about. The numbers were sometimes fun and always full of something to chew on, from the oppressive heat and the love of ice cream to shattered dreams and frustrated hopes.

To a certain extent it was fabulously ‘soap’ opera: Street Scenes’ plot concerns a housewife (a superb Elena Ferrari) who is shot by her jealous husband (a raging Geof Dolton) for having an affair with the milkman.

From the off, it was clear that there were serious problems with the sound, the performers singing with no obvious amplification. Sat towards the back of the auditorium, I could barely hear the dialogue in the opening scenes and I missed much of the nuance and pathos and beauty of the rest of the show from a sheer inability to clearly hear Langston Hughes’ song lyrics. Judging from the annoyed comments I heard around me during the performance and then during the interval, I was not alone.

Nevertheless, it was impossible not to be swept up by many elements of this production. Kate Nelson and John Moabi performed an absolutely smoking hot standout dance number and Joseph Shovelton and Simone Sauphanor were a delight as the childless Fiorentinos. Paul Curievici and Susanna Hurrell also made a real impression as participants in a doomed love affair.

The standout was, however, Ferrari. Despite a misstep production-wise when her bloodied body unrealistically walked up and then down a flight of stairs, it was heartbreaking to listen to her singing of her resistance to a “grey” life in the beautiful Somehow I Could Never Believe.