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After Rose's father murders his unfaithful wife, caught in flagrante with the milkman, we have yet another take on class and neighborhood, when two working-class nursemaids who have wheeled their pram-held charges from a cushier section of town stop by the Maurrant house to peer at the scene of the crime. One nanny says to the other, "Clarice darling would throw a duck-fit if she knew I brought her precious Dumplings to a neighborhood like this." A Brooklyn-born cop ("Harry Moiphy," as he introduces himself) sarcastically tells the nursemaids, "Drop in again, when you're in de neighborhood. An' tell Mrs. Vanderbilt Harry was askin' for her." Similarly, a city marshal who comes by to evict the Hildebrands for non-payment of rent, sports a local accent ("Better git busy wit' dat foinicher, Fred. We got two udder jobs today."). Thus, in way of speaking as well as in verbal allusion, we are given a rich portrait of a poor underclass, where even the law enforcers are essentially of the same community. (Keep an eye out for a slightly different distinction when we get to Porgy and Bess, in an upcoming piece on operas set in the South.)
The Saint of Bleecker Street takes on, more specifically, Little Italy, in which Annina, the title character, lives in the cold-water flat we encounter in the first scene. The second scene takes place in a vacant lot on nearby Mulberry Street that has been decorated for the San Gennaro street festival. We learn from Maria Corona, the newspaper-seller who knows everyone's business, that the Sons of San Gennaro who are producing the festival insist that Annina (who sees miraculous visions and, in the first scene, even suffers stigmata) be part of their procession, against her protective brother's wishes. The brother, Michele, thinks the neighborhood is too obsessed with Old World superstitions. "I'm not afraid of their saints!" he declares, "I'm not afraid of their maledictions!"...only to be overpowered by the impassioned celebrants and tied to a fence. He can only watch angrily as they lift Annina to their shoulders, to parade her through the streets just like the effigy of San Gennaro that immediately follows her in the procession.
Act II opens in a basement restaurant where Michele murders his girlfriend (see 'A Member of the Wedding, Part 2') and then flees; Act III, in an underground subway station where Annina, hoping to make a
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