"Porgy and Bess" (the Opera) Comes to Cincinnati
(first published in Express Cincinnati June, 2012)
George Gershwin’s opera “Porgy and Bess” is coming to Cincinnati Opera for the first time in its 92-year history, July 28, 30 and July 6 (7:30 p.m.) and July 8 (3 p.m.) at Music Hall.
It has been a long journey.
Based on the 1925 novel “Porgy” by DuBose Heyward and the 1927 play by Heyward and his wife Dorothy, it has been cut, altered, re-packaged and generally taken for granted since its world premiere at the Colonial Theater in Boston in 1935.
“This opera has probably been more re-interpreted and re-imagined that anything since Mozart’s ‘Cosi fan tutte,’” said Opera artistic director Evans Mirageas. “Even the very first revival in 1942, after Gershwin’s death, the producer Cheryl Crawford decided that for wartime audiences, the recitatives (sung speech) had to go. She felt that it made the opera too “highfalutin,” and the recitatives were immediately replaced with dialogue. The show was further amended for the famous tour that ran from 1952 to 1956.” It was made into a movie starring Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge in 1959 and is currently running on Broadway as a musical.
Gershwin himself called it a folk opera, and it was not accepted as a part of the traditional operatic canon until 1976, when it was revived by Houston Grand Opera. It was not performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York until 1985 under music director James Levine.
“The reason he called it a folk opera, I think, was in part because he wanted people to understand that it was his answer to verismo (reality) opera. It’s an opera drawn from real life, not an imaginary plot about gods and goddesses. It was the first grand opera to feature all African-Americans, and it’s drawn from the folk tradition, the traditions of the people.
“’Porgy and Bess’ is a grand opera (with a serious theme and the entire text set to music). It’s got everything grand opera has. It’s not unlike Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ and Mussorgsky’s ‘Boris Godunov’ (Gershwin’s models, said Mirageas), which vividly re-create a time, a place, a population. You know the people more than anything else. The chorus is as important as the principals, and it’s the same in ‘Porgy and Bess.’”
The music is some of Gershwin’s “most sophisticated,” Mirageas said. “During the hurricane scene, when the storm is at its height, it sounds like one of the ‘Sea Interludes’ from ‘Peter Grimes’ (by Benjamin Britten, composed in 1945). It’s uncanny, the scene painting he had progressed to as a composer by this point in his life.” Famous arias include “Summertime,” “I Got Plenty of Nothing” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”
Gershwin set the opera in Catfish Row, a tenement on the waterfront in Charleston, South Carolina. The cast includes Porgy, a crippled beggar; Crown, a tough dockworker; Bess, a woman dependent on Crown; Sporting Life, a drug dealer; Robbins and his wife Serena; and the fisherman Jake and his wife Clara. It opens with Clara singing “Summertime” to her baby. In an argument over a craps game, Crown kills Robbins and leaves to escape the police. Sporting Life offers to take Bess to New York, but Porgy takes her into his room instead. In act II, Crown reappears at a picnic and briefly reclaims Bess, but she returns to Porgy and they profess their love. Jake leaves to go fishing, but a hurricane blows up, killing him and his crew. Clara is killed looking for Jake, and Bess takes their baby. In act III, Crown returns again for Bess, but Porgy kills him. Porgy is arrested for questioning. Telling Bess that he is the only one left and offering her some “happy dust,” Sporting Life persuades Bess to go with him to New York. When Porgy returns and learns that Bess has gone, he leaves Catfish Row to find her.
At its tryout in Boston, the original “Porgy and Bess” was nearly four hours long, said Mirageas. “Gershwin and his team cut 40 minutes before it got to Broadway. He saw that performance many times, and never made any further suggestions as to reinstating anything. Frankly, he was a practical man of the theater and never intended the complete ‘Porgy and Bess’ to be done. There are always more ideas than there is time, and the whole tryout process is whittling it down to a show that is as nearly perfect as you can. Basically, what our audience is going to see is the opera Gershwin saw.”
Directing is Lemuel Wade, who came to Cincinnati earlier this year to direct “Porgy and Bess Redux,” a 45-minute adaptation for Cincinnati Opera’s education and outreach program. Chicago native Wade, a classically trained singer who honed his theatrical skills in Europe, met with conductor David Charles Abell last summer to decide what cuts to make in the main stage production. “You have to cut it, since it’s so long,” said Wade. “So we went back and tried to get as many of the original cuts that Gershwin came up with when he made the cuts in 1935. We tried to stick as closely as possible to his original ideas. I am trying to flesh out the characters and make them as real as possible. It’s very important to me to create a sense of community on Catfish Row, to make these people come alive so that it’s not only entertainment, but a bit of history of who these people are.”
The production is from Houston Grand Opera’s 1995 co-production with a consortium of American opera companies. “It’s designed so that all the scene changes can be done in front of your eyes,” said Mirageas. “One of the reasons Gershwin sort of overwrote it is because the set changes were onerous. Some of the more recent productions have kept some of the extra music to allow for that. This production is streamlined, basically a couple of towers and pieces that move in and out, to help the action flow swiftly.”
The cast includes bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu as Porgy, soprano Measha Brueggergosman as Bess (see her on the cover of the June “Opera News” magazine), baritone Gordon Hawkins as Crown, tenor Steven Cole as Sporting Life, soprano Josephine Echols as Clara, soprano Adrienne Danrich as Serena, baritone Michael Preacely as Jake, tenor Larry Hylton as Robbins and contralto Brandi Samuel as Maria. The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra performs for all Cincinnati Opera productions.
Tickets begin at $25, and sales are brisk. Call (513) 241-2742, visit the Cincinnati Opera box office at Music Hall, or order online at www.cincinnatiopera.org