Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber

by Block, Geoffrey

  Since several Gershwin biographies offer detailed surveys of Porgy and Bess’s pre-history, the events leading to the premiere need only be encapsulated here.6 The summer after he had first written Heyward, Gershwin met the author for the first time, and they agreed to collaborate on an opera based on Porgy. DuBose’s wife, Dorothy, who had co-authored the play, recalled years later that Gershwin informed her husband that he “wanted to spend years in study before composing his opera.”7 Although by March 1932 he wrote Heyward to express a continued interest in composing the opera, two months later Gershwin hedged again when he informed DuBose that “there is no possibility of the operatic version’s being written before January 1933.”8 The two men met in New York City even as plans were brewing for a Porgy that would feature the popular entertainer Al Jolson in blackface with lyrics and music by Show Boat collaborators Hammerstein and Kern. The Jolson project was not abandoned until September 1934, long after Gershwin and Heyward had begun their version.

  By November 1933, Gershwin had experienced two successive Broadway flops, Pardon My English and Let ’Em Eat Cake, the latter a bitter sequel to the less acerbic Pulitzer Prize–winning Of Thee I Sing. Despite these setbacks, the Theatre Guild, which had produced the popular play Porgy six years earlier, announced that Gershwin and Heyward had signed a contract to produce a musical version. On November 12, Heyward sent Gershwin a typescript of the first scene, and in December and again the following January the composer visited the librettist in Charleston, South Carolina.

  On February 6, 1934, Heyward mailed Gershwin a typescript of act II, scenes 1 and 2. Several weeks later (February 26) Gershwin informed Heyward that he had begun to compose the music for the first act and expressed his relief that their work would not suffer in comparison with the all-black opera by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts, that had recently premiered on Broadway (February 20). On March 2 Heyward sent the composer a typescript of act II, scene 3, and six days later Gershwin wrote that Ira was working on lyrics for the opening of the opera.9 By the end of March, Heyward had sent act II, scene 4, and completed a draft for act III. In April Heyward traveled to New York to meet with the Gershwins and together they created “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin,’” one of the few numbers in the opera in which the music preceded the lyrics.

  Gershwin completed the music for act I, scene 1, before the end of May. In the summer he worked on the opera in Charleston (June 16 to July 21). In a letter to Heyward dated November 5, Gershwin announced he had completed act II and begun act III, scene 2. On December 17 he reported to Heyward that he had heard a singer, Todd Duncan, who would make “a superb Crown and, I think, just as good a Porgy,” and several weeks later he wrote to Duncan (who would in fact be cast as Porgy) that he had just completed the trio in act III, scene 3 (“Oh, Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess”), and was about to orchestrate his opera. The arduous task of orchestration occupied Gershwin until three days before rehearsals began August 26.10 The Boston tryouts began on September 30 and the Broadway premiere took place October 10 at the Alvin Theatre.

  Questions of Genre, Authenticity, and Race

  Genre

  Prior to its eventual acceptance into the operatic community, reviewers and historians alike were uncertain how to classify Porgy and Bess. At its premiere the New York Times did not know whether to approach the work as a dramatic event or a musical event, and assigned first-string reviewers in both camps, drama critic Brooks Atkinson and music critic Olin Downes, to review the work in adjacent columns.11 Most subsequent accounts of these reviews conclude that Atkinson, who praised Gershwin for establishing “a personal voice that was inarticulate in the original play,” appreciated the work more fully than Downes.12 It is true that Downes, in contrast to Atkinson, expressed reservations about the stylistic disparities in the work when he wrote that Gershwin “has not completely formed his style as an opera composer” and that “the style is at one moment of opera and another of operetta or sheer Broadway entertainment.”13 Nevertheless, Downes found much to praise in Gershwin’s melody, harmony, vocal writing, and the “elements of a more organic kind,” especially the “flashes of real contrapuntal ingenuity.”

  Atkinson, who had nothing but praise for Anything Goes the previous year, put his cards on the table when he now wrote that “what a theatre critic probably wants is a musical show with songs that evoke the emotion of situations and make no further pretensions.”14 It is not surprising then that he expressed such distaste for the convention of recitative, which he, like Gershwin, designated as “operatic form.” Atkinson also questioned “why commonplace remarks that carry no emotion have to be made in a chanting monotone.”15 Playing from the same deck, Downes lamented that a composer like Gershwin, “with a true lyrical gift and with original and racy things to say, has turned with his score of ‘Porgy and Bess’ to the more pretentious ways of musical theatre.”16 For Downes as well as for Atkinson, a composer who can “go upstairs and write a Gershwin tune” but whose “treatment of passages of recitative is seldom significant,” should know his place and stick to writing great but unpretentious tunes.17

  The question of genre and “operatic form” raised by Atkinson and Downes can be traced to the earliest stages in the collaboration of Gershwin and Heyward. In fact, the issue of recitatives was their principal source of artistic disagreement. As early as November 12, 1933, when he sent the first scene, Heyward offered the following suggestion: “I feel more and more that all dialogue should be spoken. It is fast moving, and we will cut it to the bone, but this will give the opera speed and tempo.”18 Gershwin differed strongly and overruled his librettist.

  For the first decades of its history a critical consensus supported Heyward’s original conviction. In his review of the Theatre Guild production in 1935 Virgil Thomson writes critically of Gershwin’s recitative as “vocally uneasy and dramatically cumbersome” and concludes that “it would have been better if he had stuck to [spoken dialogue] … all the time.”19 Part of Thomson’s subsequent praise in 1941 for the Cheryl Crawford revival in Maplewood, New Jersey, can be attributed to her practice “of eliminating, where possible, the embarrassment due to Gershwin’s incredibly amateurish way of writing recitative.”20

  Vernon Duke—like Gershwin a hybrid classical-popular composer but unlike Gershwin a man sharply divided between his two artistic personalities, Duke and Dukelsky—was similarly critical. In their pre-compositional discussions about Porgy and Bess he recalled that “George was still under the sway of the Wagnerian formula,” which Duke believed to be “anti-theatrical,” and wrote somewhat smugly that “it is generally acknowledged that the separate numbers are superior to the somewhat amorphous stretches of music that hold them together,” that is, the recitatives.21 Less surprisingly, Richard Rodgers, who rarely abandoned the Broadway convention of spoken dialogue, also believed that Gershwin had made “a mistake in writing Porgy and Bess as an opera.”22 According to Rodgers, “the recitative device was an unfamiliar and difficult one for Broadway audiences, and it didn’t sustain the story.” Consequently, it was only “when Cheryl Crawford revived it later as a musical play that it gained such overwhelming success and universal acceptance.”23 More recently, Gershwin biographer Charles Schwartz concurred with the above-mentioned composers that the Crawford revival “vindicated” Heyward’s original conception of the work, “for as he had argued, Gershwin’s recitatives impeded the pacing of the original production.”24

  In addition to his controversial decision to give his work operatic form by connecting his musical numbers with recitatives, the composer had the audacity to load his score with hit songs, which makes the distinction between aria and recitative more glaring than in most hitless operatic works (see the list of scenes and songs in the online website). Clearly this issue was a sensitive one for Gershwin, who felt the need to publicly defend the presence of songs in Porgy and Bess:

  It is true that I have written songs for “Porgy and Bess.” I am not ashamed of wr
iting songs at any time so long as they are good songs. In “Porgy and Bess” I realized I was writing an opera for the theatre and without songs it could be neither of the theatre nor entertaining from my viewpoint. But songs are entirely within the operatic tradition. Many of the most successful operas of the past have had songs. Nearly all of Verdi’s operas contain what are known as “song hits.” “Carmen” [then performed with Ernest Guiraud’s added recitatives] is almost a collection of song hits.25

  In his overview of Gershwin’s posthumous reputation Richard Crawford offers an insightful summary of several seemingly insurmountable criticisms that made Gershwin so defensive about inserting popular songs in a serious work that in the composer’s words “used sustained symphonic music to unify entire scenes.”26 Crawford writes:

  We see Gershwin as a great natural talent, to be sure, but technically suspect, and working in a commercial realm quite separate from the neighborhood in which true art is created. So there sits Gershwin, as Virgil Thomson once wrote, “between two stools,” vastly appealing to the mass audience and hence a bit raffish, not quite deserving of serious academic scrutiny: a man without a category.27

  Authenticity

  Somewhat related to the problems of genre definition is another controversy surrounding Porgy and Bess: how to determine an authentic performing version. To place this debate in perspective it may be helpful to recall the difficulties in establishing a text for Show Boat (discussed in chapter 2). Since Kern and Hammerstein themselves revised their work nineteen years after its original Broadway run for the 1946 Broadway revival, it is arguable that this later version represents the final intentions of the creators. Despite its claim to legitimacy, however, revisionists such as John McGlinn rejected the 1946 version as an impure mutation of original authorial intent. Further, the Houston Opera (1983), McGlinn (1988), and Prince (for the 1994 Broadway revival) restored material that had been discarded—presumably with the consent of the Kern and Hammerstein estates—in the pre-Broadway tryouts. The appearance of the dropped “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’” in the first published vocal score provides fuel for the idea that Kern really wanted this music in the show but capitulated to external pressures. Other reinsertions were not supported by equally compelling evidence.

  The authenticity problems associated with Porgy and Bess (and many European operas in the core repertory) differ from those posed by the performance history of Show Boat. For example, in contrast to the Show Boat score, which was published four months into the original Broadway run, by which time the cuts had been stabilized, the Porgy and Bess vocal score was published as a rehearsal score prior to the Boston tryouts on September 30, 1935, and therefore includes most of the music that was later cut in the Boston tryouts. Thus the Gershwin score, unlike the first published Show Boat score (with the exception of “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’”), is not a score that accurately represents what New York audiences actually heard on opening night ten days later. Thanks to the work of Charles Hamm it is now possible to reconstruct what audiences did hear on the opening night of Porgy and Bess (October 10, 1935) down to the last measure.28 But the question remains: Were these cuts made for artistic or for practical or commercial considerations?

  Hamm argues that “most cuts made for apparently practical reasons were of passages already questioned on artistic grounds,” and that “the composer’s mastery of technique, his critical judgment, his imagination, and his taste come as much in play in the process of final revisions as in the first stages of composition.” In addition to the relatively modest “cuts to tighten dialogue or action,” “cuts of repeated material mostly made before the opening in Boston,” and “cuts to shorten the opera,” the openings of three scenes were greatly reduced. By the time Porgy and Bess reached New York, only twenty measures of Jazzbo Brown’s music remained before “Summertime” (and even these were eliminated a few days later), and the “six prayers” that opened act II, scene 4 were removed (though a far shorter reprise could still be heard at the end of the scene). More than two hundred measures from act III, scene 3, had also been discarded, including much of the trio portion of “Oh, Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess.”

  An examination of one deleted portion, Porgy’s “Buzzard Song” from act II, scene 1, might help to shed light on the complex issues of “authenticity” and the relative virtues of “absolute completeness.”29 As in the play Porgy by Dorothy and DuBose Heyward, upon which the opera libretto is based (rather than on the novel Porgy), the libretto draft that DuBose sent to George on February 6, 1934, concludes this scene with the appearance of a buzzard.30 In the play, the fact that the buzzard lights over Porgy’s door represents the end of the protagonist’s newly acquired happiness and peace of mind with Bess and prompts the final stage direction of the scene, “Porgy sits looking up at the bird with an expression of hopelessness as the curtain falls.”31

  The text of the “Buzzard Song” in the libretto shows Porgy’s superstitious response to and fear of the buzzard, but in keeping with his attempt to be more upbeat in his adaptation from play to opera, Heyward presents a triumphant protagonist who reminds the buzzard that a former Porgy, decaying with loneliness, “don’t live here no mo.’”32 Because he is no longer lonely, the Porgy in the first draft of Heyward’s libretto revels in his victory over superstition and loneliness: “There’s two folks livin’ in dis shelter / Eatin,’ sleepin,’ singin,’ prayin.’ / Ain’t no such thing as loneliness, / An’ Porgy’s young again.”33

  Several pages earlier in the libretto manuscript George wrote the words “Buzzard Song.” The song cue appears shortly after the arrival of the bird in the scene and Porgy’s observation that “once de buzzard fold his wing an’ light over yo’ house, all yo’ happiness done dead.”34 By placing the “Buzzard Song” earlier in the scene, Gershwin paved the way for the following duet between Porgy and Bess, “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” a subsequent addition.

  Shortly before Porgy and Bess premiered in New York, the “Buzzard Song” was among the deletions agreed to by Gershwin and director Rouben Mamoulian. There is general agreement among various first- and secondhand explanations for this cut. Mamoulian, in his 1938 tribute to Gershwin, wrote that “no matter how well he loved a musical passage or an aria (like the Buzzard Song in Porgy and Bess for instance), he would cut it out without hesitation if that improved the performance as a whole.”35 According to Edith Garson’s completion of Isaac Goldberg’s 1931 Gershwin biography, the composer agreed to this particular cut for practical reasons: “In fact, during the Boston run, it was George who insisted on cutting fifteen minutes from one section, saying to Ira, ‘You won’t have a Porgy by the time we reach New York. No one can sing that much, eight performances a week.’”36 David Ewen writes that “Porgy’s effective ‘Buzzard Song’ and other of his passages were removed at George’s suggestion.”37 Edward Jablonski explains, “Unlike recent productions of Porgy and Bess, the 1935 production had but one Porgy. So ‘Buzzard Song’ was among the first cut, in order to provide [Todd] Duncan with a chance to breathe between songs.”38

  There is little doubt that Heyward and the brothers Gershwin (mainly, of course, George) agreed to relocate the buzzard number prior to the composition of the short score that served as the foundation of the published piano-vocal version used in rehearsal. It can also be determined that those most involved in the production, particularly the composer and the director, agreed to cut the “Buzzard Song,” perhaps on the eve of the New York premiere. Presumably the cut was made primarily for the practical reason that the opera was forty-five minutes too long and that Porgy already had two big numbers in this scene.

  But the buzzard would light again with remarkable tenacity. Even during the initial run of the Broadway Porgy and Bess, the discarded “Buzzard Song” would appear among the first recorded excerpts from the opera. It was ironic that the singer on the recording—Lawrence Tibbett—was white. According to Gershwin, Tibbett was the likely candidate for a Metropolitan Opera productio
n rather than the original Porgy, Todd Duncan.39 Duncan himself sang the “Buzzard Song” along with “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” and “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” (with Marguerite Chapman) in the Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts organized by Merle Armitage in February 1937, and he included it along with other excerpts for a recording released in 1942.40

  The “Buzzard Song” was also one of the few items cut from the Boston tryouts to resurface on the first nearly complete Porgy recording (and first published libretto in English) in 1951 produced by Goddard Lieberson and conducted by Lehman Engel, with Lawrence Winters and Camilla Williams singing the title roles.41 And the song was among those portions reinstated for the Blevins Davis-Robert Breen revival that premiered in Dallas in 1952 and toured Europe later that year.42 But in 1952 the buzzard did not appear until the final scene of the opera, perhaps to symbolize Porgy’s bad luck in losing Bess.43

  Does the “Buzzard Song” belong in future productions of Porgy and Bess? The central practical issue that led to its original omission was not really its length (less than four minutes, including the recitative with the lawyer Archdale) but the strain on Porgy’s voice. Does this mean that if several Porgys had been available or if the Broadway equivalent of Lauritz Melchior had surfaced, the composer might have fought for its inclusion? Not necessarily.

  The artistic aspects are naturally more problematic than the practical ones. Can we interpret Gershwin’s remarks in 1935—“The reason I did not submit this work to the usual sponsors of opera in America was that I hoped to have developed something in American music that would appeal to the many rather than to the cultured few”—to justify the removal of forty-five expendable minutes?44 What are present-day audiences to make of Gershwin’s contemporaries, many directly involved in the first production, who without exception concluded that Porgy and Bess was better off with the cuts, including that of the “Buzzard Song”?