Street Scene is an American opera by Kurt Weill (music), Langston Hughes (lyrics), and Elmer Rice (book). Written in 1946 and premiered in Philadelphia that year, Street Scene is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1929 play of the same name by Rice. It was Weill who referred to the piece as an "American opera", intending it as a groundbreaking synthesis of European traditional opera and American musical theater. He received the inaugural Tony Award for Best Original Score for his work, after the Broadway premiere in 1947. Considered far more an opera than a musical, Street Scene is regularly produced by professional opera companies and has never been revived on Broadway. Musically and culturally, even dramatically, the work inhabits the mid-ground between Weill's Threepenny Opera (1928) and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (1957). The score contains operatic arias and ensembles, some of them, such as Anna Maurrant's "Somehow I Never Could Believe" and Frank Maurrant's "Let Things Be Like They Always Was", with links and references to the style of Giacomo Puccini. It also has jazz and blues influences in "I Got a Marble and a Star" and "Lonely House". Some of the more Broadway-style musical numbers are "Wrapped in a Ribbon and Tied in a Bow", "Wouldn't You Like to Be on Broadway?" and "Moon-faced, Starry-eyed", an extended song-and-dance sequence. Benny Goodman and His Orchestra recorded "Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed" with Johnny Mercer on the vocal in 1947. It was also recorded by the jazz vocal group The Hi-Lo's for their 1958 Columbia LP And All That Jazz. Background In Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Weill had already begun to use American jazz and popular song elements in his operas. After fleeing from Nazi Germany in 1933, he worked in Paris, then England, and then, beginning in 1935, in New York. He made a study of American popular and stage music and worked to further adapt his music to new American styles in his writing for Broadway, film and radio. He strove to find a new way of creating an American opera that would be successful both commercially and artistically. Weill wrote: It's my opinion that we can and will develop a musical-dramatic form in this country (America) but I don't think it will be called 'opera', or that it will grow out of the opera which has become a thing separate from the commercial theater, dependent upon