The Living is Now Easy for "Porgy and Bess"

The producers of  the show now known as The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess announced this week that their controversial remix of the classic musical about lovers in a poor black fishing community along the South Carolina coast is extending its run, appropriately enough, through the end of summertime. 

So take that and put it in your hat, Stephen Sondheim.

I’m being cheeky about Sondheim because, as every theater lover knows, he wrote a letter to The New York Times condemning the changes that the revival’s  creative team—director Diana Paulus, book adapter Suzan Lori-Parks and musical adapter Diedre L. Murray—talked about in an interview before the show’s out-of-town run opened in Boston last summer (click here to catch up on all of that).

The team said they wanted to make the show more accessible for contemporary audiences but after the Sondheim letter came out, the chances of showing it to any audiences seemed at risk. But Porgy and Bess, a show about black people written by white people, has always been controversial (click here to read a terrific piece about its troubled history).  So the producers bore down and pushed on. 

And now they’re reaping the rewards for their perseverance. The new Porgy and Bess is a critical success, having scored a B+ on StageGrade, which aggregates the review scores of the top New York critics. The show is turning out to be a commercial hit too, filling an average 90% of the seats at the Richard Rodgers Theatre this month, a time that’s traditionally slow for Broadway.

I wasn’t as swept away as some of the people in the audience at the performance my sister Joanne and I attended or as some other critics have been (click here to read some of those reviews) but by the end, I was giving the show a thumbs up too, even if not pumping my fist in the air. 

To be honest, I can’t say if I ended up liking this Porgy and Bess because of the production or because of the inherent power of this folk opera that is George Gershwin’s masterpiece.

Over the years, critics of the show have complained that George and Ira Gershwin and book writers DuBose and Dorothy Heyward created a stereotypical picture of African-Americans: violent men, easy women, flamboyant religiosity and dialect-heavy speech. Still, although it may be un-p.c. to say it, I’ve always had a soft spot for Porgy and Bess.

As a kid, I adored the 1959 movie because it was set in Charleston and the nearby islands where my family came from.  And it didn’t hurt that the movie seemed to have every black star working in Hollywood at the time: Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis, Jr., Diahann Carroll, Brock Peters and Pearl Bailey.

The music, of course, is gorgeous and it remains so, even if Paulus and Murray have cut more than an hour from the original score, reducing Gershwin’s nearly four-hour opera to a tidy two-and-a-half hour show (click here to read Paulus’ explanation for why they did what they did).

But all the standards are still there: “Summertime,” “My Man’s Gone Now,” “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” “I Got Plenty of Nothing” and “I Loves You Porgy,” the first adult song that burrowed into my soul and that moves me as much today as it did when my 8-year-old self would sneak into our living room and play it (quietly) over and over again on the family stereo. 

The songs have been shuffled around a bit and in some cases reassigned in the new production. Most of the recitative has been changed into spoken dialog. And dialect has been toned down (“I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’” is now “I Got Plenty of Nothing”). 

Meanwhile, Porgy, the crippled beggar who falls for the local floozy Bess, no longer gets around in a goat cart but with a cane and a leg brace (I’m not sure why they made the last change unless goats are hard to get nowadays or have become the new darlings of PETA).

Most of the praise for the production has gone to the performances. Audra McDonald plays Bess and brings all her Audra McDonald-prowess— sensational voice, great acting chops—to the role (click here to read an interview with her). And yet she wasn’t a sassy enough Bess for me. 

Norm Lewis, who plays Porgy, was out the night I saw the show and I groaned when the little slip of paper that fell out of my Playbill read “The Role of Porgy Will Be Played By NATHANIEL STAMPLEY.”  But, after a little nervousness that made his voice momentarily crack in his first number, Stampley turned in a winning performance. And since he’s a smaller guy than Lewis, seemed more physically right for the part.

The dandified Sporting Life (he used to be Sportin’) usually provides much of the show’s comic relief and David Alan Grier nails all the humor. But he also captures the malevolence that lies just beneath the bonhomie of this hustler, who deals drugs and is always around to tempt Bess.

Similarly, NaTasha Yvette Williams, a large woman who plays Mariah, the mother figure of the Catfish Row neighborhood, refuses to settle for easy, big-woman laughs and turns the character into a textured human being.   

And Phillip Boykin makes a terrifically menacing Crown, the brute who is Bess’ lover (click here to read a profile ofhim). The duet between Boykin and McDonald is the best scene in the show. 

Not everything works. I wish Riccardo Hernandez’s minimalist scenery had been a little less sleek.  When the action shifts to a nearby island for the picnic scene, a plain curtain is simply dropped over the stylized buildings of Catfish Row.  Couldn’t they at least have painted some trees on it?

I also wish Ronald K. Brown’s choreography had been more distinctive.  A family friend was a member of Brown’s dance company and so I’ve seen—and enjoyed—a good deal of his work over the years but he seems unsure of himself here. The moves don’t always fit what people would do at the moment he has them doing them.

But enough of the show works to make it worth your while to see this Porgy and Bess. There’s been no word about whether Sondheim has seen it. But I sure would love to know what he’d have to say about it.

"Chasing Heaven" Falls a Little Short of its Goal

Talent counts in the theater but luck matters too. There are nearly 200 shows in this summer’s 
New York International Fringe Festival and the challenge for their creators is to find a way to stand out in the crowd. So it would seem as though the stars have aligned for Leah Maddrie.  For although the program notes say she began working on her play Chasing Heaven five years ago, Maddrie has written and directed a satirical piece that neatly dovetails with the current debate over the new production of Porgy and Bess now playing at A.R.T. in Boston and headed to Broadway at the end of the year. 

(You’ve no doubt been following all the brouhaha but if somehow not, click here to read the article that set off the uproar, here to read Stephen Sondheim’s now notorious reprimand and here to see the opinions on both sides that keep pouring in).

Chasing Heaven tells the story of "Chasin’ Hebbin," a controversial 1930s musical that is set in a black community in South Carolina but written by a Jewish Tin Pan Alley composer named Joshua Gerwitz. The show-within-a-show’s hero is Troutbait, whom another character describes as “a blind, one-armed man with a limp who’s in love with a hussy.”  All comparisons to George Gershwin, the crippled Porgy and his beloved Bess are aggressively intended.

The plot pivots around a commission to update Gerwitz's old folk opera so that it will be more palatable to contemporary audiences. The job has been given to Kinshasa Tree Morton, a scholar of African-American and feminist studies who believes that Gerwitz stole the idea for his show from a black writer named Lolly Kibbins, who died in obscurity but has since become an icon for both the black and feminist literati. 

A good deal of the fun of watching Chasing Heaven derives from making the connections between the onstage characters and the real-life people who inspired them. Lolly is clearly a stand-in for the Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston. Meanwhile, Morton is a combo of the writers Alice Walker, Maya Angelou (like Angelou, Kinshasa has her own line of greeting cards) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, who, as fortune would have it, is the author of the current Porgy and Bess update.

The play moves back and forth between the ‘30s when Gerwitz is writing Chasin’ Hebbin, the ‘50s at the time of his death and the present. The contemporary scenes call to mind the second act of Lynn Nottage’s recent play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark in which scholars squabble over the legacy of a black actress who was a pioneer in Hollywood (click here to read my thoughts about that one). 

There’s a lot of juice to be squeezed from those stories about the images of black people in popular culture and they offer a smart way to examine how we deal—and don’t—with the issue of race in this country.

Chasing Heaven is brimming over with ideas about who has the right to tell certain stories, what responsibility comes with the telling and why we listen to some and not others.  But like Nottage’s play, it has so much to say that it too often forgets to dramatize its thoughts. Maddrie has a game cast but they’re burdened by having to spend more time expositing than acting.

Of course Fringe plays tend to be works in progress. Maddrie’s 70-minute draft shows that she already knows how to write smart and funny. So I hope more work will be done and that Chasing Heaven, which is scheduled for just two more performances, including one at 8:45 tonight, will be given more chances to reach its goal.