Set in New York's Little Italy and inspired by the Faust legend,[2] it concerns Reuben, a suicidal veteran who has received a medical discharge because he cannot speak.
[4] Hanya Holm choreographed, Robert Lewis stage directed, and Cheryl Crawford produced the show.
[5][6] Blitzstein himself described the opera as a, "picture of New York: the gaiety, plight, awareness and unawareness of anger, bitterness, insouciance, ardor, urgency, even wisdom, mellowness.
[7] An early public showing of Blitzstein's opera was scheduled for March 16, 1950, the day after Menotti's The Consul premiered on Broadway.
[7] Blitzstein did not stop editing the work and continued to revise sections up until its premiere on October 10, 1955.
[7] Musicologist Howard Pollack has noted that Blitzstein had referred to many literary figures in the opera including classical figures like Homer and Aristotle, English writers and poets like William Shakespeare, John Keats, and Robert Shaw to Americans like F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Hart Crane.
[7] Scene 1: At 9:30 pm, a pantomime unfolds between a small-time hustler Pez a lesson on pickpocketing to young vagrant Blazer.
Soon, Reuben enters, a disheartened war veteran who reminisces about the good times in his life when he was part of a circus.
Scene 2: Four "barflies" talk about their problems to the bar owner, Bart who is flipping coins anxiously as he's worried he'll lose power to his rival Malatesta.
Harry is tasked to follow him while Bart places odds on his death with Malatesta while the "barflies" watch.
Scene 4: Bart begins to feel secure in his bet with Malatesta when Reuben and Nina enter.
They talk about their new friendship and Nina invites Reuben to the San Gennaro festival in Little Italy, Manhattan.
Scene 7: The club is described by Blitzstein as a "tawdry, garish, sleazy, a Greenwich-village imitation of a fashionable night-club uptown."
Feeling unsure, when firefighters arrive with a net, he jumps and in the process reenacting his father's death.
The opera's run in Boston was a failure: audience members left in the middle of the show, and critics panned it.