Alan Jay Lerner and Kurt Weill
Opera North
Grand Theatre, Leeds
January 16-18, 2025: 2 hs 55 mins
For three performances only, and in Leeds only, Opera North delivers one of the best performances of a 1940s Broadway musical you are likely to see.
The thing is that it’s basically a recording project, done in collaboration with the Kurt Weill Foundation. Opera North has a relationship with the foundation going back to early 1996, when it last produced – and toured – Love Life, giving it its European premiere).
There never was an original cast recording when the show ran in New York in 1948-9, because of industrial action at the time of its opening. This is clearly aimed at putting a definitive version in the can. And the best way to do that, of course, is to develop a fully-staged production to the point where it hits its first few performances on peak form. James Holmes, long a mainstay of Opera North’s music team and an expert in Kurt Weill’s music, is musical director. The orchestra is in full view on stage, and if the sound quality captured is as good as what was heard in the auditorium last night, it will be magnificent.
That’s not to say that they skimp on production values. This is no mere staged concert performance, The show is directed by Matthew Eberhardt, with set and costume design cleverly conceived by Zahra Mansouri, and the choreography (of which there is plenty – including a traditional post-interval ballet, adding professional dancers to the chorus members’ talented efforts) is by Will Tuckett.
Love Life been described as the first “concept musical”, telling the story of a marriage over an imagined 150 years of US history. Husband and wife Sam and Susan Cooper are seen in a succession of contexts, each set about 30 years from the one before, but they hardly age. What changes is life in the USA, and the nature of their marriage. If there’s a message, it is that “progress” may be good financially, but it doesn’t make people happier.
The whole thing is framed and punctuated by a set of “vaudeville” numbers (actual vaudeville was history by the time). Eberhardt and Mansouri present these with colourful costuming, while the “historical” characters are in featureless black, to emphasise their time-travelling quality.
There’s a male octet, a barber shop quartet and a wonderful six-part a cappella “madrigal” chorus among the numbers. They are performed by members of the Chorus of Opera North and others, including Justin Hopkins (a Kurt Weill/Lotte Lenya artist, who’s also appearing as Sarastro in Opera North’s current revival of The Magic Flute) as a Hobo, and Zambian baritone Themba Mvula as a Magician.
The show also contains the original version of I Remember It Well, later recycled by Lerner for Gigi, the musical he wrote with Frederick Loewe.
Quirijn de Lang and Stephanie Corley are superb as Sam and Susan, with Louie Stow and Tilly Baker as their son and daughter, but every other member of the very large cast deserves a plaudit. Opera North is probably one of the few theatrical organisations outside London that could even attempt something on this scale, which makes it more the pity that it’s all over so soon.
More info and tickets here
