Everyone’s ‘Porgy and Bess’
Stephen Sondheim failed to set the agenda for Broadway camp followers when he decried the new production The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess. Instead, his argument that the DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and George and Ira Gershwin collaboration was inviolable wound up setting the stage for its 21st-century reception, proving why the show matters.
Andra McDonald and Norm Lewis in Porgy and Bess. Photo: Michael J. Lutch
Since its premiere in 1935, Porgy and Bess—as opera, musical theater, album or film—makes a relentless claim on American cultural values. Its story of black American ghetto dwellers as envisioned by white and Jewish American artists reveals the contradictions of American social and artistic history like few other works of art. Conceived as a “folk opera,” a hybrid term that mediated its authors’ ambitions and the class snobbery they opposed, Porgy and Bess was created in contradistinction to blues and jazz and Negro spirituals while alluding to them all. And all of it must always be rethought.
The current Broadway production from the American Repertory Theater (ART), directed by Diane Paulus with a new book by Suzan-Lori Parks, stars Norm Lewis and Audra McDonald in modern interpretations of the title cripple and his wanton woman. The characters’ psychology is emphasized—but within the complexity of the material, which shows its richness.
Committed actress McDonald, romantic Lewis and thoughtful Paulus and Parks contribute to the legacy of Porgy and Bess interpretations. Their intention is not to change the show but to bring it forward; their success is in not succumbing to obvious contemporary political attitudes. This Porgy and Bess—only partly emphasizing the Gershwin score—finds a loophole in political correctness by taking refuge in art.
In more politically principled times, Porgy and Bess was understood as either an expression of sympathetic imagination or an insult to a group’s self-identification (contradictions still attached to Otto Preminger’s gorgeous 1959 film version that to this day is regretted by its conscientious star, Sidney Poitier). But only a shallow appreciation of the show would condemn it for white folks’ patronizing or black folks’ humiliation.
Paulus, Parks and ART cannily follow the show’s pop heritage. This scaled-down production (trimmed from four hours to two and a half, presenting Catfish Row as a theatrical idea—more factory than community—not a political reality) suggests an intelligent, choreographed concert version to which McDonald, Lewis and the other players bring compelling presence.
Performed this way, Porgy and Bess’ narrative reveals the same triangular dynamic as Bizet’s Carmen transferred to American circumstances, a way of better understanding the same social conditions that the Gershwins surely knew also plagued the underclass of New York’s Lower East Side and were universal to the human experience: impotence, rapacity, superstition.
Now, the Gershwins’ initial cultural appropriation has been newly appropriated. Every time an artist puts a new spin on the show, its beauty and depth become more apparent as generations realize new ways to approach the material and bring out its truths.
This is the wonder of the great 1958 Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong concept album and the various renditions recorded by Nina Simone, Sarah Vaughan, Leontyne Price and William Warfield, Ray Charles and even such stand-alone interpretations as Billy Stewart’s “Summertime” and Billie Holiday’s astonishing, late, “I Loves You, Porgy,” so subtly, eccentrically personalized it obliterates all other versions (and certainly informs McDonald’s characterization).
Out of the show’s Negritude origin, modern artists reshape it, providing their own view on its stereotypes while also addressing its “classic status.” Porgy and Bess was never kitsch but music of magnificent, stylized sorrow, beauty and desperation. If the Gershwins couldn’t give this black story the fullest politics, they gave it their fullest artistry—a sign of respect that Ella, Louis, Billie and others return, thus making the songs a vehicle of African-American triumph over the would-be oppressive institutions of opera and theater and the national songbook. Sondheim’s defense on behalf of authorship was an elitist protest that ignored the reality of how interpretations happen through time.
There should be no controversy. Translating Porgy and Bess into personal art is one of the greatest, most meaningful traditions of American pop culture.
Follow Armond White on Twitter @3xchair.
