Still starry-eyed about Street Scene?

Maybe not quite so much any more: from the Decca recording sessions up in Glasgow's Govan Town Hall through the two ENO runs, I stayed resolutely moony about Kurt Weill's 'American opera'. I suppose I was never blind to its flaws - the lyrics by Langston Hughes (rather than the spoken dialogue, though both have their heart in the right place), the baggy first act with a few below-par numbers.

Yet they seemed more apparent on Friday night when I revisited The Opera Group's long-running success two years on, back at the Young Vic. I can still admire what Weill, Huges and Elmer Rice were trying to do: to convey the shortfall between the urban dream - food, glorious food, Broadway, success after school graduation - and the reality within an extended multi-racial community (probably not extending, in 1947, to blacks beyond the caretaker who gets the cheesy number 'A marble and a star').

Still, it did sag at times, with not all the text coming over the admirably large orchestra - the excellent Southbank Sinfonia seamlessly conducted by Tim Murray - which faces straight out at the audience in two tiers of the 'tenement' - some weaknesses in smaller roles and not much sense of atmosphere (it was hot outside, but cool within, incidentally). Photos by Alastair Muir (show-stealing Kate Nelson as Mae Jones and John Moabi as Dick McGann above in 'Moon-faced, starry-eyed') except for the Rose and Harry Easter shot by Keith Pattison.


There have been a few cast changes, chiefly in the juve roles. Paul Curievici looks the part of the bookish young Sam Kaplan, and sings 'Lonely House' with the right ache and anger, only slightly bottling up at the very top; Susanna Hurrell, pictured below with James McOran Campbell's Harry Easter, has a dangerous spread for a young 'un above the stave, but acted neatly and of course wrung us out with Rose's devastation after the tragedy (I always think it must be a gift of a part to emote truthfully; only imagine how you'd feel as a daughter suffering a horrible loss).


We had a new, reactionary-violent father Maurrant in Geof Dolton, looking the part but not quite butch-brutal enough (I think bass-baritone, as in Sam Ramey on the Decca recording); but his numbers are the most awkward, even if the fine ensemble did paper over the embarrassment of 'I/He loved her too'. Downtrodden-radiant Anna Maurrant was played again by Elena Ferrari: where has this soprano been all my life? She's a superb, intense actress and the only one in the cast with a seemingly flawless technique. And though John Fulljames's production has never totally worked - in the stalls, you can't see what they're all chalking on the pavement - it does make poignant and believable the potentially sentimental 'A boy like you'.


The direct emotion here comes not just from Ferrari but also from 12-year old Tyler Fagan (actually not sure that's him pictured with her above), a real natural who'll surely be singing Miles in The Turn of the Screw soon (and I guess it had better be very soon). The last Willie Maurrant I saw in this production, George Longworth, was also superb, so someone's doing a good line in training treble-actors who can really project. And all the kids, as before, are spirited.

Weill's score still moves me to tears - profoundly so, I find, in some of the underscoring, or rather the melodramas: that moment when Rose finally picks up her suitcase to leave, scored for cor anglais supported by Mahlerian harp, is a heartbreaker. You can get a sense of it in the only YouTube clip - among a sea of student production films, some no doubt good, but I didn't have time to check - from either of the two excellent complete recordings (there are also excerpts from the Broadway original). This is Bonaventura 'Bonny' Bottone as Sam with Janis Kelly - who would now make another superb Anna Maurrant - as Rose in the ENO production, conducted by Carl Davis, and the duet incorporating Whitman's 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed' at the end of Act 1.



We also have to hear 'Lonely House', one of the great 20th century tenor 'arias'. I've been listening again, with obvious emotion, to the late Jerry Hadley, such a genial presence during the recording sessions back in 1989 along with another great no longer with us, Arleen Auger (she and her good friend Della Jones camped it up as the nursemaids). Adrian Dwyer is pretty good here under I know not what circumstances, and not much graced with close-ups, but never mind



And in the meantime, in a quest for DVD life after The West Wing, we decided another American street scene, very contemporary, ticky-tacky Californian, was not for us: I picked up series one of Weeds, about a desperate widowed housewife who deals cannabis to keep her house and kids on the level, on the strength of the star, Mary-Louise Parker (pictured below by Gage Skidmore), a major West Wing light (she's also superb in Angels in America).


Can't fault her, not any of the other actors, but it's all so relentlessly grubby that I don't give a shit about any of the characters. I have no problem with filth out of the mouths of believable, rounded humanity, but there's next to nothing of that here.

Then we tried two episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, also devised (like the first four series of WW) by Aaron Sorkin, but the milieu - the usual self-regarding American showbiz scene - doesn't really interest me. And the culmination of the 'new' programme the characters are all working on, with John Mauceri - only connect, last heard of recording that Decca Street Scene and a few other things - conducting a cheesy version of G&S's Major General's Song, did not inspire the confidence to continue. Will now take up John Sleopkura/Graham's recommendation of the New Orleans drama Treme since fibre is desperately lacking after The West Wing.

Claudia Jean vs. the media moguls

Is there anyone out there who doesn't love C. J. Cregg? The White House Press Secretary in the parallel universe and not-quite-perfect-but-better-than-most American democratic government of The West Wing as played by the consummate Alison Janney, and pictured above with Martin Sheen's toweringly charismatic President Jed Bartlet, is witty, incorruptible, sharpshooting, sassy (I can pick up on that though I'm probably not the world's best expert on female sexuality) and compassionate but never in a gooey way. And the reason I mention her today is because we're up to Episode 19 of Life After Aaron Sorkin, that's to say Series 5, and C. J. is hot on the trail of a Federal Communications Commission decision which turns out to be in cahoots with big corporations controlling the media. Sound familiar?

I wonder if I can explain the specifics half as well as she does. In short, the FCC has reduced the proportion of local media purchase by the big guys from 45 per cent to 39.37 per cent, 'a number that ought to come with a decoder ring* and a jar of Ovaltine'. Why the magic figure? Because that was the limit (over)reached by 'Mert Media' when it purchased nine TV stations, and the FCC has just in effect 'posted bail' for this and the other giants which reached similar quotas - cited as Viacom, News Corp (yes, there it is), GE, Disney, Clearchannel - for 'illegally gobbling up TV stations like greasy hors d'oeuvres'.

The select press to whom C. J. wants to give the exclusive aren't interested, and she quickly twigs why: 'you don't want to write about this because it's about your corporate owners'. One says 'I'm not a media critic'; 'no-one in the media is', she shoots back, 'that's the problem' (of course everyone in the non-Murdoch-owned press is now). She's told she's partisan but insists she doesn't 'have a take' when 'one company can now own stations in 199 of the nation's 210 media markets and one company can influence the decisions of 98 senators and 382 house members' (don't you love it when your telly heroes can reel off figures like that as so few real-life politicos can?).

C. J.'s revenge is short but sweet on all those who kowtow to their 'media mogul robber baron bosses' in 'the biggest media conspiracy since William Randolph Hearst was starting wars and crushing filmmakers'. She simply brings in carpenters to the briefing room to see to it that only 39.37 per cent of seats go to the representatives of their corporate owners, one each. Everything has to go quickly back to what it was before, but she's had her victory. STOP PRESS (17/7) Where C. J. led, Miliband follows, with Clegg behind him. You saw it first, as usual, on The West Wing.


Series 5 so far has by no means been as disappointing as critics claimed the show became after visionary scriptwriter Sorkin left the scene. OK, so there's much less of the dizzying baroque wordplay, but one cast member described it as down to solid work after the honeymoon, and the way an idealistic if necessarily compromised White House functions can still spring a few surprises. We lost another sassy feminist as played by Mary-Louise Parker in, was it, Episode 5 but Glenn Close breezed in for Episode 17 - more, please - and Mary McCormack has just surfaced as a stylishly tight-lipped new Deputy National Security Advisor. We even had a likeable gay press assistant pop up in Episode 18, and he's just been glimpsed again, so there's hope. But - with the dreamy but character-hazy Rob Lowe replaced by the very definite Joshua Malina - the core team is full of people you'd want to be your best friends. Or I would. Now going off to order up Series 6.

One snag - on the evening or two in a week free at home we now watch wall-to-wall West Wing, so the last three LoveFilm movies have all been sitting unwatched for months. As I had an agonising day and a half of not yet diagnosed leg pain - the most excruciating physical incapacity I've experienced, some say sciatica, gone now, thank goodness - I took late Tuesday afternoon off work and caught up on the one J had already seen.


We love Ferzan Ozpetek almost as much as we love C. J. His visually ravishing films have immense charm and frequent lightness of touch, but at some point they all seem to evoke serious issues and a sense of what's beyond the normal parameters of life. Loose Cannons (Mine vaganti)is no exception. Set like Cuore sacro and Le fate ignoranti (surely everyone's favourite) in his adopted Italy, it's a pretty good advertisement for the beauties of Lecce and the surrounding Puglian landscapes.

Character, though, is as paramount as ever in Ozpetek's singular world. How are 'loose cannons' like a fiercely conservative patriarch's two gay sons and his mother, whom we see choose duty over love in a series of luminously-filmed flashbacks, integrated into their traditional but subtly evolving society (the Meistersinger question)? I won't spoil the plot twists except to say that one of the most touching moments is when the nonna describes how she wakes up every morning alongside the man she loved and sacrificed to marry his brother, in other words that he's always with her in spirit - and the wonderful Ilaria Occhini says this with immense dignity and no false sentimentality. In the final credits, there's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it image where you see the old woman reading in bed, and the young man as he was lying beside her. Not to give too much away, there's also perhaps the most exultant cinematic death since Thelma and Louise hurtled over the cliff. Here's Occhini (seated) with the other female stars Of Mine vaganti Elena Sofia Ricci, Bianca Nappi and Lunetta Savino.


Of course there's a fair bit of well-made feelgood about the film, too, and though its soundtrack can be insistent, I did love this disco sequence to 'Sorry, I'm a lady' by the outrageously camp Baccara (the ladies of the 70s hit 'Yes sir, I can boogie'). It doesn't evoke the general tinta of the film - though it does go all innig when the protagonist watches the girl who's fallen in love with him and his boyfriend splashing about - but it's good, simple fun. You'll need to double-click on the moving image to get the full screen effect (and the best body). Enjoy.



As a bonus for those of you whose Italian is good enough - the YouTube clips are all without subtitles - here's a scene featuring the two sisters in the extended family. They're walking through the town trying to deal with the gossip and looks following the revelation that one of them has a gay son who was supposed to inherit the pasta business. The mother gets her own back on the bitch in the shop by telling her that the girl she's so proudly announced her son is about to marry is a 'spiaggia libera' (public beach) into whose sand all the boys have poked their umbrellas. Result.



*I think that's what she said (there's no script, so I wrote it down off the telly). It sounded to me like Dakota ring, which I thought must be a kind of donut, but in an earlier episode Sam talked about a 'secret decoder ring', and this makes most sense.