|
Slumbertime
By James Yeara
Porgy
and Bess
Libretto
by DuBose and Dorothy Heywood, lyrics by Ira Gershwin and
DuBose Heywood, music by George Gershwin, directed by Will
Roberson, musical direction by Zoltan Papp
Living Arts, Inc., the Egg, Feb. 16
 Porgy
and Bess stands out amid the elitism
and effetism that surrounds opera. Set in the poor black fishing
society of the Gullahs in South Carolina during the 1930s,
the tale of the crippled Porgy and his love for the drug-addicted
beauty Bess has, from its initial performance, been a crowd-pleasing
hit that moves as it entertains. Finding the nobility of humanity
amid the reality of poverty and racism, Porgy and Bess
is a unique opera, true Americana to its core. This is an
opera to see.
With George Gershwin’s most serious music, created to display
his talents so that he would be seen as more than just a popular
composer, Porgy and Bess incorporates into its rollicking
tale of gamblers, drunks, fishermen, drug dealers, peddlers
and pious believers some of the greatest music and songs of
the 20th century. Opening with “Summertime”—its cadences like
the breeze of a June twilight—Porgy and Bess features
such familiar songs as “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing,” “I Got
Plenty of Nuttin’,” “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” and the soulful
“It Ain’t Necessarily So.” This is music that never failed
to thrill or move in previous touring productions at Proctor’s
and the Palace.
Unfortunately, aside from Gershwin’s music, the most salient
and memorable aspect of Living Arts Inc.’s touring production,
which played to the two-thirds-filled Hart Theatre at the
Egg on Saturday, was the curious juxtaposition of an all-white
15-piece orchestra and conductor and a 99-percent white audience
trying to hear snippets of songs from an undermiked and overwhelmed
African-American cast. That the 31st annual conference of
the New York State Association of Black & Puerto Rican
Legislative Caucus filled the convention center outside the
theater added to the strange separation at the Egg. That the
production was somehow connected to Black History Month added
to the ironic juxtapositioning. Porgy and Bess is a
great work of art, not a holiday ornament to be displayed
then forgotten.
The wooden set—the skeletal frame of buildings with wooden
ramps connecting to platforms upstage against a droopy cyclorama
of a painted stormy sky—often was far more animated than many
of the actors, and the set never changed regardless of time
or place. Opera is also spectacle, and Porgy and Bess
is spectacular: Two murders, a rape and a hurricane should
be as memorable and moving as Gershwin’s music. Living Arts’
staging wasn’t, with its box-step or first-wedding-dance choreography.
Randomly selecting any three rows of the audience would have
produced better dancers. The costuming was credited in the
program to a 1992 Virginia Opera Association production of
Porgy and Bess, but rather than a poor, isolated 1930s
South Carolina fishing village, the pastel ties, floral-print
dresses and khaki pants evoked a Blue Light Special or Target
Presidents’ Day sale.
Though the cast bios list numerous international and national
credits, they produced a lesser sound than Porgy and Bess
deserves, even with the production double cast with rotating
leads for each performance. Aside from Stephen B. Finch’s
menacing Crown, who brought an Isaac Hayes bass and swagger
to the role of Bess’ alcoholic lover—making very clear who
put the top on their B&D relationship—the cast’s singing
was as nondescript and flat as the scenery of Charleston’s
Catfish Row. Overall, only the sleeping was easy at the Egg
on Saturday.
|
Columns
& Opinions
