Opera North

The American Dream turns suffocatingly sour for an unhappily married couple in this one-act opera by Leonard Bernstein, whose prolific output in opera and musical theatre includes Candide, On The Town and West Side Story.

A darkly witty satire on married life in suburbia, written while he was on his own honeymoon, Bernstein’s first opera was heavily influenced both by the syncopated rhythms of jazz and the distinctive American vernacular of Hollywood movies and Broadway musicals. Sam and Dinah appear to have the perfect 1950s life – it’s a sunny morning in their “little white house” – but their growing failure to connect exposes a collective sense of entrapment. Refusing to see their son star in the school play, Sam escapes to the competitive, hyper-masculine world of work and the gym, while Dinah loses herself in “Island Magic” at the movies, where the hit picture of the day is the ominously titled Trouble in Tahiti.