You may not know the storyline of Porgy and Bess, but you certainly recognize some of the music, beginning with that standard "Summertime." Black artistic royalty have been among those who have performed Porgy in whole or in part, onstage, on-screen, on vinyl or disc, as a theater musical, as a concert or — as it was originally intended by George Gershwin — as an opera. These include Leontyne Price, William Warfield, Cab Calloway, Paul Robeson, Maya Angelou, Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr., Diahann Carroll, Pearl Bailey, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Gregory Hines and on and on.
On its way to Broadway as a musical rather than an opera, Porgy has drawn its fans and its critics. Now in previews, it is set to open next month and run through June.
The story, set in a fictitious Catfish Row in Charleston, S.C., is one of exaggerated love, lust, drug dealing, crapshooting, murder, piety among church ladies and the victimization of a good-hearted but "loose" woman, Bess, all told in a kind of Sea Island dialect. It has been stirring the artistic pot since the mid-1930s, and now Audra McDonald, the four-time Tony winner, and David Alan Grier, the comedian, actor and two-time Tony nominee, are on Broadway with The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess. The creative team includes the acclaimed director Diane Paulus and the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama, Suzan-Lori Parks.
As producers of the new theatrical version promised to make changes that would, among other things, appeal to a contemporary audience, they triggered a debate led by the Broadway eminence Stephen Sondheim, who says there is no need to mess with the original, and Hilton Als, the New Yorker critic who says that Sondheim doesn't know what he's talking about in this effort at "humanizing the depiction of race onstage." Als says that Parks and Paulus "have rescued a work that was mired in condescension and a bizarre and unreal sexuality."
The staged musical theater piece is not the same as the opera, but the storyline is the same and raises the same issues of whether this is a period piece that should be appreciated for all the groundbreaking effort Gershwin put into it in the 1930s or whether it is a period piece that should be archived in a museum. It raises insecurities that blacks still have about the past, seen and heard during the recent Broadway play Driving Miss Daisy and the acclaimed film The Help. A lot of folks don't want to go back there, while others say we must if we are to go forward.
Grace Bumbry, who performed the role of Bess in the 1985 production by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, later said: "I thought it beneath me. I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come far too far to have to retrogress to 1935. My way of dealing with it was to see that it was really a piece of Americana, of American history, whether we liked it or not. Whether I sing it or not, it was still going to be there."
This is what Gershwin said in the New York Times in 1935, when critics were trying to figure out how to categorize Porgy: "Because Porgy and Bess deals with Negro Life in America it brings to the operatic form elements that have never before appeared in the opera, and I have adapted my method to utilize the drama, the humor, the superstition, the religious fervor, the dancing and the irrepressible high spirits of the race. If doing this, I have created a new form, which combines opera with theater, this new form has come quite naturally out of the material."
If you are black and involved in music and theater, Porgy has probably figured in your repertoire as it has in Sebron's. Joseph Joubert, who is currently part of the musical team of the acclaimed Billy Elliott on Broadway and has been a professional musician for 35 years, performed the role of Jasbo Brown, a musician, in the Metropolitan Opera's productions in 1985 and 1989 and served as rehearsal pianist for that second go-around.
"It has all the elements of a great opera," he says. Joubert is among those who appreciate the work for what Gershwin intended. "His fascination with our culture — he really penned it to paper. It's the only piece like that that captures our stuff in the opera world."
Roosevelt Andre Credit, who first performed in a concert version of Porgy and Bess while in college, is in the ensemble of the new Paulus-Parks Broadway musical production as one of the fishermen. He appreciates the "tender touches" that have gone into this production, which started with cast members doing extensive research into black life in the Sea Islands off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia. The characters have been fleshed out and empowered. "These people on Catfish Row are in anybody's family," he says of the realism that this production presents.
Going back to the original format, people like my friend Bertie Ray lll, an entrepreneur who is on the board of the Cincinnati Opera, which will present the opera next summer, say that people should accept this as what opera is: oversize. "People are drawn to Porgy and Bess like they are drawn to Faust because of the drama, the intrigue, the passion. It's Faustian! It's opera in its highest and finest fashion. And it is uniquely American."
Be that as it may, performers like Sebron say it is time for more opportunities to open to black, classically trained performers — especially black men. "You will not get many singers to publicly speak against a production of Porgy and Bess, but privately I reckon that there is a certain amount of artistic fatigue … Our community also has to support artistic productions that don't necessarily have the instant recognition that Porgy and Bess brings."
Editor's note: A previous version of this article misstated that Suzan-Lori Parks was the only black women to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama. Lynn Nottage won in 2009 for "Ruined."
E.R. Shipp, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is a frequent contributor to The Root.