The play “Porgy and Bess” has never been one to will me to see it. I’ve never been curious about this folk opera written, produced and performed during a time when black people were not seen as real but as caricatures. So, I had my own idea of what it must have looked like.
The brothers George and Ira Gershwin, and DuBose Heyward wrote their opera in the 1930s and it was performed on Broadway for the first time in 1935. I have bits-and-pieces of memory of scenes from one incarnation of the opera: the 1959 movie with Sidney Poitier pushing himself around on a cart as a crippled Porgy chasing after Dorothy Dandrige as Bess that I likely saw on TV.
A year or so ago at auction, I came across a Decca Records four-LP set from the 1935 opera, featuring Todd Duncan (Porgy), Anne Brown (Bess) and the Eva Jessye Choir. It was Decca Album No. 145, Personality Series. It apparently was the first of two volumes – this one released in 1940 and the other in 1942.
I picked it up because it was free and historical, but didn’t have a bit of interest in listening to it. The photo on the album cover showed black folks hanging out of windows and black men lying lazily around a yard. It looked exactly as I expected.
Some of the songs on the album were well-known, though: the lazy stroll of “Summertime (which I learned was written by Heyward)” and the brazen nonchalance of “It Ain’t Necessarily So (by Ira Gershwin),” “Bess, You Is My Woman,” and “I Loves You, Porgy (also by Heyward).” I always thought these were all written by the Gershwins.
I came back to the album today, ready to listen to some of its tunes but found that my old record player had speeds of 45 and 33 but not 78. I was inspired after having spent more than two hours over the weekend watching a new musical version of the opera called “The Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess” on Broadway.
A week or so ago I had turned up my nose when a friend suggested that she wanted to see “Porgy.” Why, I wondered. It was probably full of stereotypes– I see enough of those images on the auction tables – so why spend my money to see them in 2012.
Yet, I was curious. I’d never seen the play in its entirety, and so I warmed to the idea. I soon learned that the composer Stephen Sondheim had criticized the new production by director Diane Paulus and writer Suzan-Lori Parks, who revamped the original to make it more contemporary and fresh. He hadn’t seen the play but was reacting to their remarks about updating it. The musical opens Thursday, Jan. 12 at the Richard Rodgers Theater.
Sondheim’s comments – and the positive reviews the play is getting in previews – apparently sparked a lot of people’s curiosity. The matinee performance I saw was packed, and the audience gave the performers a standing ovation.
I stood and applauded them, too, for their performances, singing and choreography. But I’m still not sure how much I liked the play. It didn’t wow me. I didn’t cheer for any of the characters or empathize or sympathize with them. The 1935 opera played around in my head, and I couldn’t shake that indistinct notion of what it must’ve been like for the performers back then.
This new version was obviously updated. These folks, although poor, weren’t pitiful or beaten down. They showed deference to the white law enforcement with little of the Stepin-Fetchit-ness. These people lived their lives in their own swath of a community in Charleston, SC, called Catfish Row, where the men fished during the day and played craps at night, the women looked after them, and they all enjoyed their annual picnic on an island nearby. Interspersed were the killings of black men by the hands of other black men – then with blades instead guns.
The musical kept some of the commonly seen black characters: the overweight woman and the brutish man (fortunately, there were only one of both). When the male character, Crown – played by Philip Boykin – came out for his bows, the predominantly white audience booed him. That’s how well he played such an awful person. They also booed the two white police officers, who mildly terrorized the community.
Playbill noted that when the opera went on tour in 1936 and landed at the National Theater in Washington, DC, Duncan refused to perform before a segregated audience. (Another version of the story says Brown was the one who first refused.) The cast members held out until the theater agreed to desegregate.
Both Duncan and Brown were classical singers. Already a performer, he apparently was recommended to George Gershwin as a potential Porgy, while she was a music student at Julliard who applied for an audition. The original play was called “Porgy,” but Gershwin is said to have liked her so well that he filled out the role of Bess – and renamed the opera “Porgy and Bess.”
The play was based on a 1925 novel “Porgy” by Heyward (who with his wife Dorothy wrote a play based on the book), who had grown up in Charleston. He was both hailed and criticized for his characterizations of black people – which were regarded as right on the mark or way off it.
At the play last weekend, Audra McDonald was her usual wonderful self; Norm Lewis was a very convincingly crippled Porgy, and David Alan Grier can actually sing (although I thought his character became a little too much of a caricature).
All in all, it is a production worth seeing.
