Word: tenements
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...years ago, one of the most fetching things about Street Scene is its street scenery: Jo Mielziner has once again designed an ingenious three-story tenement fagade...
Spilling out of a Manhattan tenement onto a June-baked side street are all Mr. Rice's once-familiar exhibits-gossips, sluts, roughnecks, a dispossessed family, a jittery expectant father, the Negro janitor, the Italian music teacher, the Jewish law student, young Rose Maurrant whom he loves, and Rose's ill-mated parents-the mother who has taken a lover, the father who has taken to drink. Long brooding over the Maurrants, melodrama bursts upon them at last-with two quick revolver shots behind an open window...
Perhaps the melodrama muscles into the new Street Scene a bit too conspicuously; there is, at any rate, a good deal less of the old garish street life, the huddled, gabby tenement humanity. But, endangered by a lot of song-&-dance distractions, the story builds much more strongly by leaning on plot rather than people. And it finds time for enough that is human and humorous. Composer Weill (Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark) scores with all his lighter songs and with some of his romantic ones. And there are good people to sing them-notably, opera singer Polyna Stoska...
...triples as peanut-vendor, confidential agent and Minister of War in Groucho's parlor cabinet, shows the verve and talent for pantomime that has, in later productions, been drowned in a flood of dialogue and cute piano-peeking. Margaret Dumont, accused by Groucho of looking like an old tenement, is the perfect foil through bedroom to parlor to bedroom. If S.J. Perelman did not invent the gags there was some compensation in money-maker Leo McCarey's direction...
Summer was here. In its outward manifestations it was about average. There had been heat-nothing sensational-but enough to make an undertaker sweat and a dog hunt shade. Big city subways were beginning to smell, tenement fire escapes were draped with bedding, park benches were solid with sitters. Bugs were back and committing suicide on a million windshields. Theaters boasted: "Cool Inside." The ice was about gone from high western lakes. Crab grass was invading lawns, screen doors already needed repairs, school was out and at least 53,487 small fry had been stung by bees or splotched...