Love Life overview – surreal Kurt Weill musical skips by the many years with aptitude | Music

The curtain rises on a magic present. A lady is sawn in half, and a person is suspended in mid-air when his chair disappears. Left alone on stage by the magician, their dialog reveals the pair are married to 1 one other – and have been for the previous 157 years.

Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s Love Life was a “idea” musical avant la lettre: a time-hopping pageant of vignettes wherein, at intervals all through their everlasting marriage, Sam and Susan Cooper renegotiate their relationship within the face of every period’s trendy issues – framed by musical commentary from an assortment of vaudeville acts. “Good economics … awfully unhealthy for love” intones a barbershop quartet earlier than Sam insists on scheduling a possible third youngster round his enterprise journeys. Susan’s foray into first-wave feminism, in the meantime, is heralded by a trio of Shirley Temple-like Tots singing about their moms’ neuroses.

Matthew Eberhardt’s manufacturing, with designs by Zahra Mansouri, maybe correctly opts for relative minimalism. In opposition to a set consisting largely of metal girders and risers, together with a bandstand for the orchestra, Sam and Susan stay in the identical timeless black outfits all through, in distinction to gilded theatrical element for the vaudevillians.

Love Life boasts near 60 smaller and ensemble roles, many solid right here from Opera North’s refrain, revelling in varied configurations as madrigal singers, magicians’ assistants and extra. There are charismatic turns, too, from baritone Themba Mvula because the snakily charming Magician/Con Man, bass-baritone Justin Hopkins because the Hobo, and dancers Holly Noticed and Max Westwell, whose Divorce Ballet, choreographed by Will Tuckett, appears to leap straight out of Hollywood’s golden age.

Inevitably, it’s Sam and Susan themselves who dominate, every gaining in emotional intelligence and musical depth with each encounter. Quirijn de Lang cuts a sardonic determine as Sam, his sinewy baritone impressing in songs whose titles converse of self-satisfaction (Right here I’ll Keep, This Is the Life) whereas their content material grows ever extra agitated. As Susan, a vocally indisposed Stephanie Corley acts with heat and slow-building grit, teamed with standout singing from her cowl, refrain member Katie Sharpe, who’s deservedly positioned within the highlight for her electrifying quantity Mr Proper.

Carried out by James Holmes, a Weill specialist, the Orchestra of Opera North zips by the present’s genre-shifting rating with aptitude, significantly when the appearance of the Roaring 20s permits them to indicate off their jazz stylings.

Productions of Love Life have been uncommon since its premiere, however this one luckily gained’t be misplaced to posterity: in collaboration with the Kurt Weill Basis, it would kind the idea of a solid album recording – the primary ever made from this surreal however (in each sense) well timed piece of musical theatre historical past.