XL COVER STORY

Rethinking 'Porgy and Bess'

Zach Scott's Dave Steakley creates a new version of the opera-musical

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Thursday, January 24, 2008

It wasn't always on his list.

Dave Steakley, artistic director of Zachary Scott Theatre, has a long ever-changing wish list on his laptop of shows he hopes to one day do — shows that are challenging, different or have production rights that are prohibitively expensive for the nonprofit theater. But of all the great American plays and musicals, "Porgy and Bess" — George Gershwin's 1930s masterpiece that fuses blues, jazz, gospel and folk music idioms into a sprawling, dramatic opera — wasn't always on Steakley's radar. For all of the 45-year-old director's thorough knowledge and utter adoration of musical theater ("Dreamgirls," "Jelly's Last Jam," "Ain't Misbehavin' " and "The Rocky Horror Show" are just a few of the shows he's presented) he didn't consider "Porgy and Bess" until the late Joe York, the popular Austin actor and regular on the Zach Scott stages, challenged him almost 10 years ago. "In fact, I didn't really know the show," Steakley says.

So Steakley hit the record store and picked up a recording of the opera's 1935 premiere. The original cast of "Porgy and Bess" were all classically trained opera singers, and they were accompanied by a lush 80-piece symphony orchestra. Steakley was intrigued. "The operatic style is a very specific aesthetic," he says. "(The original recording) was lovely, but it wasn't necessarily the most listenable — not a rock out in your car kind of recording."

But that Ray Charles and Cleo Laine 1976 version he also picked up? "Wow!" Steakley says. "I loved the contrast of their voices — Ray Charles' rough-and-tumble blues sound and Cleo's clarity and vulnerability. There was just something in their combination of strength and fragility."

He became a devoted fan of the Charles/Laine recording and started seeking out others: the Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong recording from 1957, Nina Simone's smoky-voiced version of "My Man's Gone Now" and also the late '50s big band collaborations of Sammy Davis Jr. and Carmen McRae.

And Steakley put "Porgy and Bess" on his wish list.

Then two years ago, his fundraising staff alerted him to the National Endowment of the Arts American Masterpieces program, a recent grant initiative that finances the production of important American arts, from the visual arts to chamber music to musical theater. (Austin's Tapestry Dance Company received a $50,000 American Masterpieces grant in 2005 to produce "The Souls of Our Feet," an acclaimed survey of classic American tap dance.) The obvious candidate for Zachary Scott Theater to present to the NEA: "Porgy and Bess."

But Steakley is not exactly in the business of doing operas. Nor did he think Zach audiences would respond to a classically styled opera. He dug into the long story of Gershwin's musical masterwork.

Score restored

Since its premiere in 1935, "Porgy and Bess" had been cut down numerous times from the original three-hour opera version and presented in shorter, more musical theater renditions. The 1950s saw Hollywood grab hold and produce a movie treatment that excised even more of Gershwin's score and turned the libretto into long stretches of spoken dialogue. Countless singers have recorded concert versions of the show's most popular songs. Houston Grand Opera presented a full-length opera version in 1976. British director Trevor Nunn created both a musical theater version and an opera version in the 1990s.

"There's 75 years of people re-configuring this work — a whole history of people trying to make 'Porgy and Bess' work for a particular audience at a particular time," Steakley says.

So for Austin in 2008, he decided that the best approach to "Porgy and Bess" was to restore parts of the score that are usually cut out of musical theater renditions, but present the show with the production values, styles and performers typical of Broadway musicals, not operas. And as for the musical style itself? The inspiration would come from Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Ray Charles and Cleo Laine and the traditional New Orleans Preservation Hall jazz band. Steakley decided to stage the show in the new Austin Music Hall, where it opens Friday for a 10-show run, so that he could make the point that this "Porgy and Bess" connects to Austin's live music scene.

It's an expensive undertaking. Though Zachary Scott Theater received $50,000 from the NEA for the production, the costs of staging the large show — the cast includes 34 actors, the band counts nine musicians — at the Austin Music Hall are more than $600,000 or two or three times what the company typically spends to produce a show.

Still, Steakley is keen to prove that the higher stakes are worth it. "This is an opportunity to open 'Porgy and Bess' up to people for whom the traditional opera sound is something they can't connect to," Steakley says. "I wanted to create an accessible 'Porgy and Bess' that makes sense for us today, here and now."

Novel turned opera

Making sense of "Porgy & Bess" has been part and parcel of the work since almost before Gershwin wrote a note of it. The composer was smitten the first time he read DuBose Heyward's 1925 best-selling novel "Porgy," the tragic love story about a disabled African American street-beggar in the tenements of Charleston, S.C. Heyward, who was white, wrote his character's dialogue in Gullah, the creole language spoken by African Americans in the coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia. "Porgy" was critically acclaimed by mainstream white critics but only tacitly acknowledged by the black press.

For his part, Gershwin, the ambitious and talented son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was determined to use "Porgy" as the basis for his first opera — what Gershwin hoped would be, as he saw it, the first "American folk opera."

Gershwin had already achieved popular and critical success for his musicals such as "Lady Be Good" and his "Rhapsody in Blue" that fused classical and jazz idioms. Heyward and his wife, Dorothy, liked Gerswhin's offer, but first the couple transformed the novel into a play. The show flourished in New York and on tour. Then, singer Al Jolson, who was white, bought the film rights to "Porgy" hoping to turn it into one of the first musical motion pictures with sound. And Jolson wanted to play the lead — in blackface. The movie never materialized. By 1932, the rights to "Porgy" were free and clear, and Gershwin got down to work on his opera with Heyward and Gershwin's brother Ira writing the libretto. George Gerswhin traveled to Charleston in search of musical inspiration, soaking up the sounds at church services, nightclubs and prayer meetings.

The end result was a sprawling four-hour score that told the love story of Porgy and Bess, two outsiders on the fringe of their community — the poor Charleston tenement known as Catfish Row — who find each other and fall deeply in love, only to have that love threatened by sinister, destructive characters. But Gershwin had agreed to have New York's Theater Guild — a commercial theater — produce the premiere so that the show might have a longer run on Broadway and not be confined to a few showings with a traditional opera company. Even before "Porgy and Bess" opened in New York in October 1935, Gershwin made some drastic cuts, trimming it down to three hours but not forsaking its operatic stylings.

The show drew divided reaction. Critics differed on whether "Porgy and Bess" was a musical or an opera. The show played 124 times before closing — by Broadway musical standards a failure, by opera standards an unheard-of hit.

The opera's depiction of African Americans also attracted controversy. Jazz great Duke Ellington declared "the times are here to debunk Gershwin's lampblack Negroisms." The Negro Repertory Company of Seattle, as part of the Federal Theater Project in the late 1930s, canceled their plans to present "Porgy and Bess" because the actors didn't like what they considered to be racist portrayals of African American life. Years after its opening, several original cast members also said that they had concerns that their characters might play into negative stereotypes of African Americans. Heyward's novel presented a community of illiterate, poverty-stricken people living in drug-infested violent slums and speaking in an obscure dialect.

The tussles continued. Opera or musical? Racist or respectful?

A drastically cut version — the cast was cut in half and most of the sung recitatives were transformed into spoken dialogue — opened on Broadway in 1942 to great success. Then in 1952, "Porgy and Bess" was restored to its more operatic origins in a production that toured the world and launched the career of famed soprano Leontyne Price. It became the first American opera ever staged at Italy's legendary La Scala theater. A 1956 staging of the production in Moscow marked the first time an American theater group had been to the Soviet capital since the Bolshevik Revolution.

As triumphant as all that was, by the time Hollywood began work on a movie version of "Porgy and Bess" in the 1950s, producer Samuel Goldwyn envisioned an even more drastically cut and popularized version. Harry Belafonte declined to play Porgy, objecting to the show's portrayal of African Americans. The role was offered to Sidney Poitier, but he later said he regretted playing the part. With the rise of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, "Porgy and Bess" was considered out-of-date and inappropriate. Lifted out of the context of the story line, its many wonderful songs — among others, "Summertime," 'My Man's Gone Now," "I Got Plenty of Nothin' " and "It Ain't Necessarily So" — remained a regular part of the popular jazz repertoire. But, for the most part, "Porgy and Bess" dropped from the radar.

Enter Houston Grand Opera. After the venerable Metropolitan Opera abandoned plans for a Bicentennial year revival of the original opera version of "Porgy and Bess," the upstart Houston company decided to take on the challenge. The production represented something of a sea change for Gershwin's opera. Restored to its original length, sung by a whole new generation of talented opera singers and understood as a cultural period piece that forms an important chapter in the history of American music, "Porgy and Bess" was finally accepted into the canon of 20th-century opera. It is now regularly performed internationally; Dallas Opera will present a new production in February.

New Orleans influence

"How would we take inspiration from all the previous versions to create the 'Porgy and Bess' that makes sense for Austin?" Steakley asks. "I mean, on one hand we have all these great historical renditions to consider and then there's Fantasia singing 'Summertime' on 'American Idol' and introducing (Gershwin's music) to a whole new generation?"

It was just a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina had pummeled New Orleans when Steakley sat down to write his artistic statement on "Porgy and Bess" to send to the national endowment.

"I couldn't get New Orleans out of my head," he says. "I kept thinking about the way so many New Orleans musicians had just relocated to Austin, how Louis Armstrong, whose sound is so quintessentially New Orleans, brought so much to 'Porgy and Bess.' "

While not giving his "Porgy and Bess" any specific New Orleans references, Steakley has musically based the score in the traditional jazz band that emerged from the famed Preservation Hall. Replacing the soaring string section of an opera orchestra are a banjo, a harmonica, an acoustic guitar, drums and a handful of brass and reed instruments. He also added back several songs and musical sections that were typically cut from theater versions, including a percussive piece in the third act played entirely with everyday objects as the people of Catfish Row rebuild after a hurricane.

After holding auditions in New York, Steakley plucked Broadway actors to play the lead roles. David Jennings, who plays Porgy, has starred in "Ragtime" and "Miss Saigon." Marva Hicks, who plays Bess, was Rafiki in "The Lion King" and has sung backup for Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson. Steakley has also enlisted the choreographic talents of Broadway veteran and transplant to Austin, Robin Lewis.

"My hope is that this will make 'Porgy and Bess' more accessible," says Steakley. "Ultimately this is a story of a man who loves a woman unconditionally. It's the most romantic notion of love. And it's told through some of the richest music in (America's) history. Music that really everyone can connect to."

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699

'Porgy and Bess' recordings

Dave Steakley's favorites:

1. 'Porgy and Bess,' Ray Charles and Cleo Laine, 1976. RCA.

2. 'Porgy and Bess,' Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, 1957 recording from 'The Complete Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.' Verve Records.

3. 'It Ain't Necessarily So,' Aretha Franklin, from 'Queen in Waiting: Columbia Years 1960-1965.' Sony.

4. 'My Man's Gone Now,' Nina Simone from 'The Greatest Hits.' RCA.

5. 'Boy Meets Girl,' Sammy Davis, Jr. and Carmen McRae, 1958 recording including 10 songs from 'Porgy and Bess' including 'Summertime' and 'It Ain't Necessarily So,' among others. Verve.

Other recommended recordings and DVDs:

'George Gershwin's 'Porgy and Bess,' Houston Grand Opera. Recording of 1976 production. RCA.

'George Gershwin's 'Porgy and Bess,' Miles Davis and Gil Evans. Jazz orchestral version. Sony.

'The Gershwins' 'Porgy and Bess,' Nashville Symphony Orchestra. First contemporary recording that incorporates the composer's final revisions for the 1935 premiere. 2006. Decca.

'The Gershwins' 'Porgy and Bess,' Trevor Nunn and Sir Simon Rattle with the Glyndebourne Opera. DVD from the 1993 BBC telecast.