Weill saw a production of Elmer Rice's Pulitzer-Prize-winning play Street Scene in 1929, before leaving Berlin; he would return to it 18 years later, after his move to the United States, as the source for one of his most successful stage works. Weill enlisted the author himself to revise the text, and the noted poet Langston Hughes to write song lyrics; the resulting work, variously called an "American Opera," a "Broadway Opera," and a "Broadway Musical," was a critical success: Olin Downes, the often reserved music critic for the New York Times, called it "the most important step toward significantly American opera that the writer has yet encountered in musical theater."

The story of Street Scene centers around Anna Maurrant and her family—residents of a New York City brownstone. The conflicts between Anna, her husband Frank, and their daughter, Rose, become the focal point in the drama. This family drama set within the larger context of the brownstone and its residents, making the work feel like a sort of "day in the life" in its lighter moments. In order to capture the flavor of city life, Weill conducted extensive "field research"; he sought to make everything from the children's games and schoolgirls' songs to the dance numbers more authentic. As Weill himself noted, "the play lends itself to a variety of music, just as the streets of New York themselves embrace the music of many lands and many people."

Street Scene incorporated several timely issues in its dramatic progression: racial tensions, questions of poverty and social justice, and domestic issues, including infidelity and violence. The weight of all of these maladies is symbolized by the opening number, "Ain't it awful the heat"—the scorching weather is a tangible incarnation of the oppressive circumstances under which the tenants live. In this sense, Street Scene hearkens back to the psychological tension of Weill's earlier one-act opera, Der Protagonist (1925); in that work also, it's just a matter of time before unfortunate circumstances bring underlying tensions to the surface, with tragic consequences. In both cases, the outcome is apparent well ahead of time, and part of Weill's genius is letting the audience carry the weight of that knowledge without losing dramatic purpose or musical interest.

Weill saw Street Scene as his greatest achievement, a perfectly balanced integration of music and drama. As Weill wrote in a memo to his collaborators, "Ever since Elmer and I started talking about this show, we thought in terms of... a show that flows naturally from dialogue into music and back... It is no accident that the emotional parts are the high spots of the show because we have achieved a complete blending of music and words and action."

Memorable excerpts from the score include the comical "Wouldn't You Like to Be on Broadway?"; Frank Maurrant's family values polemic, "Let things be like they always was"; the light-hearted "Ice Cream Sextet"; and Sam Kaplan's "Lonely House." In every case, the engagement between Rice's carefully pruned drama, Weill's music, and Hughes' song texts is made clear; the work jells into an engaging and stylistically interesting piece of musical theater.

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