It Ain't Necessarily So

By Michael Walsh

A new Porgy and Bess stages Gershwin as grand opera

George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess has had a curious history. At its premiere in 1935, it received mixed notices and was thought by many to be a failure; yet now it is considered by some to be the great American opera. Blacks were initially offended by its implicit Uncle Tomism; Duke Ellington declared, "The times are here to debunk Gershwin's lampblack Negroisms." Yet black singers have sprung to prominence in its roles, among them Todd Duncan (the first Porgy), Leontyne Price and William Warfield (in a 1952 revival) and Clamma Dale (in the 1976 Houston Grand Opera production). Today an opera written by a white composer that depicted a group of fighting, wenching, gambling, dope-taking blacks is practically unimaginable. Yet Porgy travels on.

Over the years, Porgy has generally been produced as a musical show with a truncated score, reduced orchestration and spoken dialogue. It was this adulterated version that became widely known; the landmark Houston production rightly restored both the cuts and the recitative, or sung dialogue, that Gershwin originally wrote. The latest incarnation, which opened last week in New York City's cavernous Radio City Music Hall, is an even grander version of the Houston Grand Opera staging: almost uncut, spectacularly designed and reasonably well sung by a large, rotating cast of principals.

Based on Dorothy and DuBose Heyward's 1927 play and set in Charleston, S.C., Porgy is the story of a crippled beggar's unconquerable love for Bess, a lady of easy virtue. So strong is Porgy's passion that he kills his rival, Crown, and when Bess is whisked off to New York by the smooth-talking Sportin' Life, Porgy quixotically sets out after her in his goat cart. Porgy is a relic of the first important period in American opera, the '30s--a decade that also saw Louis Gruenberg's The Emperor Jones and Howard Hanson's Merry Mount. Other composers who have tried their hand at native grand opera include William Schuman, Aaron Copland, Douglas Moore, Samuel Barber, Roger Sessions and the prolific Gian Carlo Menotti. But few of their works are frequently heard. The American national opera remains an elusive ideal, and even Porgy, for all its popularity, does not quite qualify.

Porgy's strengths are obvious. The creation of one of America's most brilliant native musical talents, the opera boasts a number of songs that have become standards: Summertime; I Got Plenty o' Nuttin '; Bess, You Is My Woman Now; It Ain 't Necessarily So. More subtle, but no less impressive, are the choruses, which give voice to the residents of Catfish Row: their lamentation in Gone, Gone, Gone, their exuberance in Ain't Got No Shame, their terror in Oh, de Lawd Shake de Heavens. Proudly, Gershwin considered his work "the greatest music composed in America," and some of it is.

This is, however, not enough to make a convincing opera. Gershwin excelled as a songwriter, but his grasp of large-scale organization was weak. The individual numbers of Porgy are tenuously linked together by a few recurring themes (such as Summertime and the melody of Porgy's opening aria, They Pass By Singin') that are never developed. A less diffuse libretto than DuBose Heyward's might have obscured this structural weakness, but so many characters compete for attention that the opera's sprawling nature is accentuated.

The new production is visually as good as one is likely to see, although the Metropolitan Opera hopes to stage Porgy in 1984-85. The star at the Music Hall is not a singer but a set: Douglas W. Schmidt's huge Charleston street scene. The decrepit three-story waterfront buildings, adorned with flower boxes and lines of laundry, are practically a self-contained village, giving the production a vivid, realistic air. During the outing to Kittiwah Island, the scene is transformed into a sunset idyl, with pink-edged clouds and a grove of palmettos, pines and mangroves.

The robust, enthusiastic cast, which has four different Porgys and four Besses, offers no major vocal discoveries, but the production's most serious defect is the 5,882-seat Music Hall itself. The necessary miking of the singers destroys the show's operatic aspirations by distorting the voices and giving them a hard, unnatural quality. With tinny sound blaring from the loudspeakers, one might as well be watching mimes accompany a recording.

Like Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann, Gershwin's Porgy and Bess was a popular composer's attempt to write a serious opera. Said Gershwin: "If I am successful, it will resemble a combination of the drama and romance of Carmen and the beauty of Meistersinger, if you can imagine that." There are romance and beauty in Porgy, and in greater proportion than are usually found in popular theatrical entertainment. But, like its hero, the work is ultimately flawed: too good for Broadway, and yet not quite grand opera. --By Michael Walsh This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.