This weekend, at the Muny here in St. L., an adaptation of Porgy and Bess is in its final performances. One is going on now at the moment of this auto-posting (no, 3CM’s not there), and the final show is tomorrow night. The actual title of the production goes:
“The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess: The Broadway Musical”
This is the production directed by Diane Paulus, first performed in Boston in August 2011 and then transferred to Broadway that winter, and now on tour. This re-working of the classic opera with music by George Gershwin, libretto by DuBose Heyward, and lyrics by Heyward and Ira Gershwin, caused a mini-ruckus of controversy at the time, not least because of a blistering attack on the proposed re-tooling of the opera by no less than Stephen Sondheim.
Self figured, trying to maintain some pose of intellectual honesty, that he’d better see the show for himself, before rendering any sort of judgment on Paulus and her collaborators. So who’s right on this one? Well……
Before giving you that judgment, the NYT article that fed the ruckus is this article by Patrick Healy, which mentions:
" This Porgy and Bess….is taking George and Ira Gershwin’s landmark work in uncharted directions, in hopes of making it both widely accessible and artistically fresh. Ms. Paulus and her chief writing collaborator, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, have also created scenes, invented biographical details and, in their most radical move, added a more hopeful ending that may roil purists who cherish the ambiguous final moments of the original.”
Following this article, Sondheim sent the
NYT a letter to the editor, which is reproduced at the NYT’s ArtsBeat blog
here. To give some examples of what elicited this blistering response from Sondheim, for starters, here’s one quote from Paulus in Healy’s article:
”In the opera you don’t really get to know many of the characters as people, especially and most problematically Bess, who goes back and forth from Crown’s woman to Porgy’s woman while also addicted to drugs”.
Sondheim’s riposte:
” Ms. Paulus says that in the opera you don’t get to know the characters as people. Putting it kindly, that’s willful ignorance. These characters are as vivid as any ever created for the musical theater, as has been proved over and over in productions that may have cut some dialogue and musical passages but didn’t rewrite and distort them.
What Ms. Paulus wants, and has ordered, are back stories for the characters. For example she (or, rather, Ms. Parks) is supplying Porgy with dialogue that will explain how he became crippled. She fails to recognize that Porgy, Bess, Crown, Sportin’ Life and the rest are archetypes and intended to be larger than life and that filling in ‘realistic’ details is likely to reduce them to line drawings.”
Or this quote from Parks:
”“I feel this work more than anything is a romance, and so I wanted to flesh out the two main characters so they are not cardboard cut-out characters. I think that’s what George Gershwin wanted, and if he had lived longer, he would have gone back to the story of Porgy and Bess and made changes, including to the ending.”
Um, actually, even without putting Sondheim’s reply here (which will come in a moment), on what basis does Suzan-Lori Parks deign to judge that George Gershwin would have changed the ending? He could have done that at the time. He was no fool, nor was Heyward or his brother. But here’s Sondheim’s own snarky riposte:
” It’s reassuring that Ms. Parks has a direct pipeline to Gershwin and is just carrying out his work for him, and that she thinks he would have taken one of the most moving moments in musical theater history - Porgy’s demand, ‘Bring my goat!’ - and thrown it out.”
Speaking of goats, there’s also this quote from Paulus that really got Sondheim’s:
“I’m sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires having your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.”
One wonders if Paulus has ever seen Debussy’s opera
Pelleas et Melisande, where the heroine isn’t always ‘understandable’ or ‘fully rounded’, in the conventional superficial sense, which requires the audience to, yes, engage with and even think about her character. Sondheim’s own reply on is as follows::
” Then there is Ms. Paulus’s condescension toward the audience. She says, ‘I’m sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.’ I don’t know what she’s sorry about, but I’m glad she can speak for all of us restless theatergoers. If she doesn’t understand Bess and feels she has to ‘excavate’ the show, she clearly thinks it’s a ruin, so why is she doing it? I’m sorry, but could the problem be her lack of understanding, not Heyward’s?”
To be somewhat fair to Paulus, Sondheim seems more than a bit over the top in raising the possibility that Paulus might not “understand Bess”. I think that Paulus does have her own understanding of Bess. The problem comes when Paulus tries to take out any sort of need for the theatergoer to come to her/his own understanding of the character.
There’s actually even one passage which Sondheim could have leveled into, but chose not to, for some reason (although I can postulate a theory in the comments later if anyone cares). It’s this passage by Phillip Boykin, who sang Crown in the first performances of this new production, and who has operatic experience of the role in ‘standard’ productions of the work, per Healy’s article:
”“Usually the performances and experience of Porgy and Bess are all about voice, sound, worrying about the B flat. Now there’s an actual dramatic arc to Porgy and Bess.”
With all due respect to Boykin,
Porgy and Bess has always had an “actual dramatic arc”. Paulus and Parks didn’t put in any new arc that didn’t exist before. They’ve simplified it, if anything, but they didn’t create one whole cloth to cover Heyward’s deficiency there. Plus, it’s really hard to imagine that the singers in
Porgy and Bess, or indeed any other opera, don’t think about telling the story, besides trying to sing the music correctly and well.
The Post-Dispatch of this touring production is here. P-D theater critic Judith Newmark also had an advance article about Diane Paulus and this touring production here. I saw this show a few nights ago. It’s a bit droll to read in the program booklet this comment from Mike Isaccson, the Muny’s artistic director, about the avowed intentions of Paulus, Parks and music arranger Diedre L. Murray here:
"Their idea – not without its initial detractors – was to create a Porgy for Broadway, a production that would draw a brand-new audience. As they worked, Paulus, Parks and Murray clarified and fleshed out the characters, and highlighted the show’s intense drama, putting particular focus on the character of Bess."
No kidding about the “initial detractors” part, or at least one in particular. In that light, here’s 3CM’s meaningless judgment of the artistic case of Paulus, Parks & Murray vs. Sondheim:
Short version: Sondheim wins.
Long version: things seemed to bode well, at least for me, when the opening music pretty much stuck closely to the original. However, trepidation on 3CM’s part set in quickly with the loss of the Jasbo Brown piano solo at the start, and the presentation of a medley of some of the hit melodies in a standard format Broadway show overture. Once past the newly-fangled overture and the applause, we go into Act I proper. The first aria (whoops, number) is “Summertime”, sung by Clara - in a key transposed down from the original. Cue for mental cringing by 3CM, although the reason for the transposition became clear not long after, when her husband, Jake, joined her in the next chorus, effectively making a duet of “Summertime”. Another major, and jolting (to 3CM, but probably to no one else there) key shift came with Porgy’s “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’”. I wondered if it was to accommodate the vocal range of as Porgy, but then in “Bess, You Is My Woman Now”, he starts it in the original key, so that’s not the issue.
However, when Porgy sang at the start of that classic duet, he adopts a crooning manner more than once. In fact, to misquote Jerry Lee Lewis, there seems to be a whole lotta croonin’ goin’ on. In cutting and reworking the music, Murray has more than once diluted it, to the point of dumbing down, into a superficial, near smooth-jazz like veneer (complete with synthesizer keyboard) that is a poor substitute for the full orchestration, even granted that the Muny’s pit (and most theaters for musicals) will only allow for a small band anyway. The one singer who seems closest to the operatic roots of the original is, interestingly enough, Alicia Hall Moran as Bess, in her vocal power. This is ironic in the context of the Healy article, where the Bess in the original production, Audra McDonald, was specifically one of the most vocal advocates of the Paulus-led alterations to the original.
In general, though, the one character who seems the least altered stylistically in going from the original opera to this musical theater version is Sportin’ Life (Kingsley Leggs in this production), the happy-go-lucky and thoroughly amoral drug dealer who drags Bess back down to drug addiction in the end. Sportin’ Life’s music is the most rooted in scat singing, and wouldn’t need much in the way of “popularization” (dumbing down?). To the re-workers’ credit, they don’t indulge in too much of that with respect to Sportin’ Life.
Overall, if you have never seen a staging of Porgy and Bess, in any form, whether live or Memorex, what you get here is basically a perfectly well-crafted piece of theater. The harsh elements like the knife fights, taking drugs, and on-stage killings are admittedly more than what you would think a “family-friendly” audience like the Muny’s would be expected to take, especially as “entertainment” on a night out. But to give the Muny audience credit, when you see moments like the Catfish Row residents playing dumb for the white detective and police to try to outfox them, or when Maria verbally takes down Sportin’ Life with a well-aimed bit of snark, the audience laughs along sympathetically. Also, the one scene where any rewrites or slim-lining is least noticeable is the hurricane scene in Part II, where the sheer force of the situation literally carries everything along. In the very last scene, as Porgy prepares to set off for “Noo York” to try to find Bess, the way that Parks has rewritten the set up of Porgy’s final number, “I’m on my way”, is imaginative on its own terms, with the Catfish Row residents turning their backs on him (because they see Bess again as totally unworthy of him) and him starting the number by himself, with no orchestra, and the residents only slowly turning back to face him and join in, even if it’s not the way that the original goes.
Therein lies the problem: this version of Porgy and Bess is not what the Gershwins and Heyward wrote. No one should be under any illusion that this adaptation by Paulus, Parks and Murray is anything but that: an adaptation, and their diluted adaptation at that. (Granted, even with their attempts to spoon-feed the audience and fill in what they perceive as “gaps” in the story, it’s still a reasonably smart piece of theater. In other words, even though I use the term “dumbing down” here, the dumbing down is from a tremendously high intelligence level down to a pretty good, certainly above-average intelligence level.) Sondheim concluded his tirade as follows:
” In the interest of truth in advertising, let it not be called The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, nor even The Gershwin-Heyward Porgy and Bess. Advertise it honestly as Diane Paulus’s Porgy and Bess. And the hell with the real one."
I can take Sondheim’s idea farther as follows:
The Paulus-Parks-Murray Porgy and Bess.
Paulus obviously bears the overall responsibility, even with Parks and Murray as the main aiders and abetters. Their version is most emphatically not “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess”, even if the contractual obligations by the Gershwin estate require billing as such, per Paulus as noted in Newmark’s preview article:
”We did not make that change. The Gershwin estate did that years ago. I keep saying that over and over, but nobody knows it.”
Sondheim actually addressed this point savvily in advance in his letter:
” If this billing is at the insistence of the Gershwin estate, they should be ashamed of themselves.”
Admittedly, part of my bias and slight ‘warping’ of my perspective compared to the rest of the Muny audience was that I had listened to a full, complete recording of the opera not too long ago, prior to seeing the show at the Muny. So subliminally, if not necessarily with respect to every line or note, I knew or felt instinctively what was missing, again unlike pretty much the rest of the people there. In the recording that I listened to, conductor Lorin Maazel lays it on the line thus:
”Porgy and Bess is an opera. It is not an operetta, a musical comedy, nor is it a jazz drama, Black Blues, or pre-Soul……Gershwin’s compassion for individuals is Verdian, his comprehension of them, Mozartean. His grasp of the folk-spirit is as firm and subtle as Moussorgsky’s, his melodic inventiveness rivals Bellini’s, ingenious and innovative are his compositional techniques. How glorious it is to hear the entire opera, without the dozens of cuts, which have mutilated form, flow, dramatic tension.”
Going back to Healy’s comment in his article about Paulus and colleagues wanting to make
Porgy and Bess “widely accessible and artistically fresh”, I fail to see the need on the latter especially, especially after I’d heard the Maazel recording. That was the first time I’d really heard the whole opera full on (and I’d seen two other live performances, which had trims). The freshness of the music hit me for the first time in full, beyond seeing the earlier live performances. If anything, Maazel’s recording goes in the opposite direction, as it restores about half an hour of music that was cut from the out-of-NYC runs in Boston. Granted, a full listening of
Porgy and Bess would take 3 hours, without breaks between the 3 acts. And it’s not every city that has an opera company that can stage the full opera, to be sure. But anyone with the motivation can either borrow a recording to listen to the work in its full glory. There’s nothing ‘stale’ about the music that requires others to ‘freshen it up’.
To close, from across the pond, the English composer Robin Holloway characterized Porgy and Bess, in the context of Gershwin’s overall output, as follows:
”…Gershwin’s concert works reveal, beneath the bravado, a character both vulnerable and naïve: the best reply to his anxious quest for approval, demonstrated by his insatiable desire for high-class composition lessons, is Ravel’s ‘Why be a second rate Ravel when you can be a first rate Gershwin?
Porgy and Bess is a different matter. Its inspired fusion of Broadway and Hollywood with Negro Spirituals, Shouts and Blues puts the whole endeavour on a different plane; for all its manifest lapses it stands with Berg’s Wozzeck and Britten’s [Peter] Grimes, Janáček’s Káty’a [Kabanová], Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth [of the Mtsensk District] - the outstanding operas of compassion for the social outcast, breaking down barriers of style, class and race.”
Citation: Robin Holloway, “’But is it art?’ Gershwin in a classical context”, from On Music: Essays and Diversions 1963-2003, Continuum, p. 362 (2003)
With that, you can either:
(1) Discuss Porgy and Bess, or:
(2) Completely ignore the subject and observe the standard SNLC protocol.
In terms of the majority of any comments here, my money is most comments doing the latter ;) , although 3CM has been known to be wrong on prior occasions……