Porgy and Bess

Several Thursdays ago, I went with Maggie to witness a performance of Porgy and Bess –  the great opera composed by George Gershwin based on a novel by DuBose Heyward, who also wrote the libretto and co-wrote the lyrics with Ira Gershwin – on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theatre.

I will preface my remarks by saying that the way I reacted to the singing could have been influenced by sitting at the right side of the third row, and that could have partly accounted for some differences between my reactions and those of Ben Brantley in The New York Times. But before I say anything else, I want to urge all of you who can to go to this production. It is exciting and feels very real, and the performances were sensational. I found all of the acting great and enjoyed all the dancing, though I wasn’t sure all of it would have been essential if this weren’t being done on Broadway. I also was extremely impressed by the singing from the entire cast. In particular, NaTasha Yvette Williams almost stole the show with a charismatic performance as Mariah, and Phillip Boykin in more limited time on stage was equally charismatic as Crown. Norm Lewis was completely convincing as the crippled Porgy, and sang strongly and with great expression all the time. Audra McDonald was very impressive, playing the role of Bess as a woman who always seems to be in over her head (you could see it in her facial expressions before she sang, but she almost always sounded confident while she was singing, and when she didn’t exude confidence while singing, it was by design). David Alan Grier played the part of the evil trickster/cocaine dealer/pimp, Sporting Life, perfectly. Maggie’s friend, Heather Hill, did a star turn in only her third performance as Serena, singing “My Man is Gone,” complete with a high Eb(!) after her husband was murdered by Crown over gambling winnings. And Nikki Renee Daniels did a beautiful job as Clara, who famously begins the vocal portion of the show by singing “Summertime.” And it shouldn’t go without notice that the somewhat reduced orchestra (all who could fit in that pit, I believe) played very well, and the conductor, Constantine Kitsopoulos, paced the music expertly.

I loved the opera version that I saw at the New York City Opera in 2002 with my parents. The current Broadway production is not the same as the opera. In some ways, I think it is superior; in others, inferior. What I loved about this Broadway production was that a lot of the added action and dialogue on stage made the sung numbers feel even more organically meshed with the life of a real community than in the opera version. While one or two people were singing, others talked among themselves, pumped water from a well, played cards – just continued living, as it seemed and felt. This show is also a lot more graphically violent than the opera production I saw, and I consider that, too, to be all for the good. It felt particularly real-to-life that the white cops beat people up each time they came to Catfish Row. As we all know, police brutality in America’s ghettos is still a big problem today, and there’s no question it was part of life in the segregated South of yesteryear.

Sometimes, added dialogue really helped give a new dramatic sense to songs many of us have heard numerous times. Probably the best example of this was just before Porgy sang “I Got Plenty of Nuttin'”: He came out of his hut, grinning from ear to ear, and some of his neighbors asked him what he’d been up to: “Nuttin’.” After a few more moments of dialogue (in which he repeated “Nuttin'”), he launched into the song, giving a new, sensual meaning for “nuttin'”! Other times, it may have confused the issue. As I recall from the opera, immediately after Porgy and Bess sing “Bess, You is my Woman Now,” other women in Catfish Row encourage Bess to go on their annual community picnic, and she goes, thereby immediately giving the lie to the line in the song that states “But I ain’t goin’! You hear me sayin’/If you ain’t goin’, wid you I’m stayin’!” In this Broadway production, Porgy himself joins in encouraging Bess to go on the picnic, giving her actions a different context that is not as dramatic, to my taste.

I am more critical of some changes in the score. Let’s first discuss the overture.  Here is the opening of the show, as performed by members of the original cast, featuring Anne Brown as Clara, with the Decca Symphony Orchestra in 1940. (The violins have intonation problems, but listen to how they swing!) You’ll notice that there is no overture to this opera. Why is that? Perhaps because this was in a real sense a jazzy American verismo opera, and as in Italian verismo operas such as Madama Butterfly and Tosca, the composer didn’t want to create an artificial division between the orchestral introduction and the beginning of the drama. So why did the arranger for this Broadway show version feel it was necessary to create a souped-up overture, including anachronistic styles of orchestration that were not used by Gershwin? Worst of all, the overture ended with the tragic, dissonant music that in the opera version, we never hear until the very end of the opera. Hearing that music so early in the show robs it of some of its dramatic power.

But that wasn’t the deviation that bothered me the most, and I got over it because the rest of the show was so exciting and the performances were so great. My biggest problem was with the ending. The last number of Porgy and Bess is “I’m on My Way,” also known as “Oh Lawd I’m on My Way.” It sounds like an uplifting spiritual for most of the song, but it’s a devastating tragedy, because Porgy – who, depending on the version, can’t walk at all or can barely walk – has decided to walk from Charleston, South Carolina to New York in search of Bess, who has gone on a boat to New York with Sporting Life to be essentially a crack whore (she snorts cocaine instead of smoking it, but the analogy otherwise holds). We know he’ll never make it, so the biting blues chord you can hear right before the end of this rendition (apologies for some crackling on the recording) cannot be resolved to a major triad. And what I heard at the end of the performance a few weeks ago, if my ears or memory did not deceive me, was a major triad. The reduced orchestration was probably at fault, too, in that there was an insufficient crescendo for that crucial #9 chord, whose dramatic effect I’d compare to the unresolved 1st-inversion chord at the end of Madama Butterfly.

I don’t want to have the last word in this post, though. Please listen to this PBS NewsHour segment on the new interpretation of Porgy and Bess that I saw. While I have big problems with some of the things the arranger did to the music (and in spite of that, most of it is there and still works well!), I think you will see that Suzan-Lori Parks, who did the dramatic reinterpretation of the show, is very sincere, loves the show, and has done her best to improve it, with the blessing of the Gershwin estate. So whether you love it or hate it (and I think there’s way more to love than hate), go see it!

I Got Rhythm

These three words constitute the title for probably the most famous song ever written for the Broadway stage. In an interview on the Rudy Vallee Show, George Gershwin declared it his favorite of all the show tunes he had composed. (You can hear a clip from that episode of the  Rudy Vallee Show here, and Gershwin plays “I Got Rhythm” starting at 6:51, after having played three other songs of his.) Every jazz musician needs to learn this song and master how to improvise across its chord changes, which are second only to the 12-bar blues as groundworks for jazz. There are probably dozens if not hundreds of “Rhythm tunes” – new melodies based on the chord progression underlying “I Got Rhythm,” usually without the “tag” that Gershwin included at the end of the chorus (though Sidney Bechet’s “Shag” is a wonderful example of a Rhythm tune that includes the tag) – and several of those are also part of a working jazz musician’s repertoire. Those of my generation will probably remember one Rhythm tune in particular: the theme song to “The Flintstones.” But though almost any alternative is good for a change of pace, none of the Rhythm tunes is nearly as good as the Gershwins’ original masterpiece.

I’d like to talk about a famous recording of the song as interpreted by Ethel Merman, in 1947. Merman created the role of Kate Fothergill in the 1930 debut of Girl Crazy, the musical which includes “I Got Rhythm,” at the age of 21, and performed the song often in recitals as well as in the theater. When you listen to this recording, you will notice the verse (introduction – that is, the sung introduction, not the intro the orchestra plays in this arrangement). It’s not often performed, but it’s great. With other lyrics, its rather dissonant minor music would sound very mournful, but in this context, it is more nearly contemplative, and perfectly prepares the chorus of what’s probably the most joyous celebration of music in any musical. The chorus has the well-known melody, but try to listen to it once again, as if for the first time. Note how the syncopations are almost breathless, not wanting to wait to shout for joy.

As for Merman, hear how healthy her voice was. She performed in the days long before microphones were used on Broadway, and when she sang, the customers in the last row of the highest balcony had to be able to hear her and understand every word. So she had to sing very loudly and clearly, without straining. Undoubtedly, part of this was just her luck in having great vocal cords, but she took very good care of them, which is why she had a long career. The time of the classic Broadway shows, when there was no amplification and full orchestras played live every night, will never return, but aren’t we lucky that, through the magic of recording, we can still ask the question “Who could ask for anything more?” along with the late Ms. Merman?