Sondheim vs. Porgy & Bess - YIKES! — Page 12

bobbybaby -

"Porgy and Bess" is an opera. Yes, there are flaws. On the other hand, much of the music is very sophisticated. The end of Act I Scene 1 is difficult and takes a long time to rehearse to get it right. Act I Scene 2 is musically breath taking. The opera sounded fresh the day it opened and it is still fresh today.

How long any show runs does not always say much about its quality. The most performed play in the United States, "Our Town," ran for 336 performances when it first opened on Broadway. One of the great American plays, "Long Day's Journey Into Night," ran for 390 performances. Both plays are still performed around the country.

The "Carrie" authors can rewrite from now until doomsday and their show will never match "Porgy and Bess."

You erroneously state that the 42, '43 and '44 productions were flops--actually, they were all the same Cheryl Crawford production--and ask "Success by Mandelbaum's loose standards, who knows if it made it's money back?"

You are simply wrong. Cheryl Crawford's 1942 production received rave reviews and went from Broadway to a very successful tour, so successful that it came back to Broadway for limited runs in '43 and '44. (The 1944 New York run was at City Center.) She was a shrewd producer who knew how to make money taking artistic risks and she made that production run for THREE years...DURING A WAR!

This Life Magazine from February 1942 attests to the production being a hit due to Chery Crawford's "canniness":

As for the 1952, Robert Breen production, that lasted for over FOUR years and toured internationally under the aegis of the State Department, bringing worldwide acclaim to the opera and the cast, which included William Warfield, Leontyne Price and Cab Calloway as Sportin' Life. It played Vienna, Berlin and London, then went to Latin America and the Middle East.

In 1955, it even played La Scala in Milan. The poet Maya Angelou, then starting out as an actress, played Ruby and later wrote this about the La Scala premiere:

This was something unique: famous white American performers had appeared at La Scala, but never blacks, especially not a huge cast of blacks such as Porgy provided. Both audience and company were tense. Every member of the cast was coiled tight like a spring, wound taut for a shattering release. The moment the curtain opened, the singers pulled the elegant first-night audience into the harshness of black Southern life. The love story unfolded with such tenderness that the singers wept visible tears. Time and again, the audience came to their feet, yelling and applauding. We had performed Porgy and Bess as never before, and if the La Scala patrons loved us, it was only fitting because we certainly performed as if we were in love with one another.

After that. the tour went on to Moscow, and if you want to read more about that, you can pick up Truman Capote's "The Muses Are Heard." He accompanied the cast to Moscow and wrote about it for The New Yorker.

But "flop" is just not true.

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But the 1942 and 1952 productions were not flops. They ran on Broadway and on tour for years and years and were financial and artistic successes.

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Bobbybaby, I brought up Sondheim's runs because of your hat. It seemed ironic that somebody who took his hat from Company would argue for long runs as the measure of success. Ironic. And just an observation, nothing more. It wasn't intended to be an insult.

BTW, I haven't seen the Houston Grand Opera's balance sheets for the 1970s revival, but IIRC that show, whole expensive, also had a substantial tour.

The fact is NO opera supports itself by box office alone these days. All companies are dependent on public funding (which barely exists any more) and large amounts of private donations.

So if we're going to say Les Miz is better than P&B based on the length of its run, then we must also say Les Miz is better than Butterfly, Tosca, Don Giovanni and Rigoletto. And of course Rent is far superior to La Boheme.

At some point I think the folly of this exercise becomes apparent.

Bobbybaby -

With each post, you keep digging the hole you're in a little deeper.

You don't seem to know much about opera. There are many genres. To name three: Opera buffa (an example: The Marriage of Figaro), Opera comique (an example: Carmen), and Verismo (Pagliacci).

Yes, Porgy and Bess only ran 124 performances. No so good for a musical; great for a new opera. If it had been done at the Met, which didn't do many new works, it would have run for fewer performances. Few operas were done on Broadway.

You dismiss the work because Gershwin called it a folk opera. So what! In 2009, San Francisco Opera staged "Porgy and Bess" and the called it an opera. The run was sold out. A production of the opera is currently running at Seattle Opera which is one of the major companies in this country. Speight Jenkins, General Director, calls it an opera. Tickets are hard to come by. In May and June of this year, the Court Theatre in Chicago staged a successful production.

You boast, "Carrie" broke international boundaries by having the first half American half British cast." Wow! This doesn't even rate a footnote in Broadway history.

The following is from "The Life and Times of Porgy and Bess" by Hollis Alpert. I suggest you find a copy and read it.

"The cuts made for the first production gave rise to questions and controversy in later years. Was this version, shortened for practical reasons, true to Gershwin's conception of his opera? Did he intend all those missing forty minutes from what became known as the "the full score" to be performed in the future? On thing is certain: after Porgy opened in New York, GERSHWIN MADE NO FURTHER CHANGES.
[Rouben] Mamoulian [director of the opera] always maintained that it was as the composer wanted it. A birthday party on stage of the Alvin was given for the director two days before the opening. Gershwin had a gift for him -- some rolled-up pages of the score, tied with a red ribbon. According to Mamoulian, Gershwin saiud: "This is my thank you for making me take out all that stuff in Boston."

bobby, I was only amused at the irony of your hat v. your argument.

You are right that length of run is one way musicals have been evaluated. But some of us think some shows, including P&B, Follies, Street Scene, Golden Apple, Sunday in the Park, Passion and even Ragtime transcend that measure.

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Sondheim was responding not to the mere suggestion that P&B might be altered in some way, but to the specifically stupid comments made by the collaborators. And even so he concluded by saying the finished adaptation should be judged on its own merits.

Updated On: 2/20/18 at 07:36 PM

Has it occurred to anyone that it is possibly not Porgy and Bess that is dated with steriotypical characters but us today in 2011.

We are 55 years away from the black and white people who lived at the time of Memphis and 90 years from Porgy and Bess. Gershwin was writing for and about people is his lifetime. We can make all kinds of judgements about his bias as a white man or his characterizations of people. How much have we changed history in our own minds?

Look at the way whites are portrayed in musicals such as Guys and Dolls or Anything Goes. Everything changes a great deal.
I wonder how much of what we consider a steriotype is simply the fact that people change in their morals , their outlook, their hopes, and their conduct. Hindsight is not 20/20. It is often just us looking for easy explanations as to why things happened.

Updated On: 8/15/11 at 02:32 AM

Bobbybaby85: you want to champion CARRIE because you obviously love the work. The vast majority of the posters on this very long THREAD obviously love PORGY AND BESS and are defending it by presenting facts which you simply don't want to accept. You are not coming across well at all. To put CARRIE in the same league as PORGY AND BESS is laughable, pure and simple. Barbara Cook did not leave the British production of CARRIE without a reason. She knew something that you apparently don't--it seems to be more than a flawed work, despite its small number of fanatics that want it to succeed so badly. Get over it.

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Just an aside...I was walking up 8th yesterday and out of the corner of my eye I caught the show's marquee. I realized I was nowhere near 42nd street but the marquee reminded me of Mary Poppins at first glance.

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bobby, it's true that various influences were combined in the 19th and early 20th centuries to create what we now call American musical theater.

But theater was musical from its inception thousands of years ago in places such as Greece and Africa and Asia. The "Chorus" of ancient Greek tragedy and comedy was a real singing and dancing chorus, not a solo actor declaiming poetically (as was so often the case in the 20th century). In some traditional African theater, the entire village may take the part of the Chorus, but the singing and dancing are no less a part of the performance.

If anything, it's more accurate to say "non-musical" theater was invented in the 19th century with the rise of Realism and Naturalism.

And while there have long been terms for different types of opera, the idea of opera as a HIgh Art form that is something apart from popular theater is a modern construction. (Though Wagner's theories formed a foundation for our modern notions, in his day even he thought he was writing for a mass audience of all classes.)

In Verdi's and Puccini's eras, the general public anticipated and attended their works--and even learned to sing the hit "tunes".

Updated On: 8/15/11 at 03:29 PM

Traditionally it was the Brits who were more concerned with being overwhelmed by an invasion of American actors. (This was due to the difference in the sizes of the two countries and the relative strength of the two unions.)

In the 60s, 70s and 80s, AEA was pretty famous for caving on this (and many other issues).

I admit my knowledge is out of date, but there's the back story.