Stream Opera North's Recording of LOVE LIFE Beginning This Weekend

Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner's Love Life will make its BBC broadcast premiere this weekend. The production will air on BBC Radio 3 18:00 on February 22. Following the broadcast, audiences can stream the production for 30 days. Tune in here.

Kurt Weill's Love Life was immensely successful when it was first performed in the late 1940s, it ran for more than 250 performances, but has had few outings since and has never attracted a recording. In Opera on 3 this evening Mark Forrest and Emily MacGregor introduce a new production from the Leeds Grand Theatre given by Opera North. More a musical than traditional opera, Love Life belongs to Weill's American period, written after his flight from 1930s Germany. Once in America Weill absorbed the many different styles of American popular music to create a piece that conveys the sounds and atmosphere of American from the1790s to the 1947. He teamed up with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner (co-creator of My Fair Lady) and with the esteemed director Elia Kazan to create what is often referred to as the first 'concept' musical, paving the ways for the likes of 'Chicago' 'Company' and 'Cabaret'.

Love Life tells the story of the marriage of Sam and Susan Cooper and their two children Elizabeth and Johnny, but imagined across a life span of 250 years in order to explore how external forces, especially economic and technical change, impact on a relationship. The more naturalistic episodes of the story are cut around vaudeville like scenes which provide comment on their circumstances. This new production has been created by Matthew Eberhardt with design by Zahra Marsouri and choreography by Will Tuckett and is given in collaboration with the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music.

Cast:

Quirijn de Lang (Sam Cooper)
Stephanie Corley (Susan Cooper)
Tilly Baker (Elizabeth Cooper)
Louie Stow (Johnny Cooper)

Justin Hopkins (Hobo)
Themba Mvula (Magician/ Vaudevillian/Con Man/Interlocutor
Will Hopkins, Joshua Da Costa, Andrew Randall, Masimba Ushe (Quartet)
Holly Saw (Magician Assistant/Dancer)
Max Westwell (Dancer)
Felicity Moore, Amber Midgley, Lottie Gray (The 3 Tots)

The Orchestra and Chorus of Opera North conducted by James Holmes.