Rescued! Love Life is the musical that got away. This 1948 collaboration between Kurt Weill, the German composer exiled on Broadway, and Alan Jay Lerner, the future librettist of My Fair Lady, was plagued by problems and rewrites. It never had an original-cast recording, and despite running for more than 200 performances in New York it disappeared from sight, submerged in a period whose runaway musical successes included Kiss Me, Kate and South Pacific.
Yet its influence continued to be felt in the circle of innovative composers of music-theatre, from Leonard Bernstein to Stephen Sondheim, copied for its startling and sometimes bizarre chronological and stylistic originality. For what Weill and Lerner conceived was a vaudeville, a random collection of acts around a theme, bound together by a storyline that spanned generations from 1791 to 1948, illustrating shifting marriage conventions and sexual mores, a device that would become less unusual in the period of the “concept musical”.
Sam and Susan Cooper and their two children are unchanging in age across those years, but are subject to the different pressures of the times. In between those scenes, there are wacky interruptions from troupes of singer-dancers on themes that challenge the triumph of love, from progress and economics to mysticism and horoscopes. Weill’s idiom is part-satirical, part-heartfelt; Lerner’s libretto is ultra-slick, slightly too clever for its own good.
Opera North had a go at a revival in 1996, but that didn’t quite work, and they have commendably returned to launch this minimalist but highly effective staging by Matthew Eberhardt (economically designed by Zahra Mansouri) to coincide with making the first full recording of the piece under their ever-energetic Weill specialist James Holmes. The orchestra is up on stage, so we can hear Weill’s pungent scoring particularly clearly. The curtain comes halfway down for the vaudeville numbers, giving a clear rhythm to the show.
Led by magician Themba Mvula, the illusions of love are explored in a quirky succession of numbers: the vivacious Tots Trio of Felicity Moore, Amber Midgley and Lottie Gray clearly have a great future in store, though all the ensembles in this company show have vitality and idiomatic skill. There’s a punchy suffragettes number, a ridiculous madrigal, a noble aria for the down-and-out hobo Justin Hopkins, and the touching Susan’s Dream (cut from the original show), which creates the paradox of family life that “Susan dreamed exactly what she had”.
Binding the show together as a compelling couple, moving with the times as their relationship falls apart, Stephanie Corley is Susan (who stonkingly delivers the climactic number Mr Right) and Quirijn de Lang is Sam (who makes a brutal attempt at living alone in This is The Life), supported by Louie Stow and Tilly Baker as their talented children. Some of the dialogue is clunky, and the basic question – has marriage become more difficult across 150 years? – is never quite answered. But as the final rip-roaring vaudeville fills the stage, for all the stylistic jumble of this work, you feel it has touched a nerve and, performed with this continuous vigour, has also reinvented a genre. Bring on the recording, and some more revivals.
Until Jan 18 (operanorth.co.uk) and on BBC Radio 3 on Feb 8
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