It comes back to their quotes in the article. They act as if they are the first people ever to cringe and the only people to know how to make the work un-cringeworthy. There's no way they can remove enough of those aspects of the work. No way. So their honorable motives can only make
Many African-American performers and musicians over the years have felt exactly the same way, starting with Duke Ellington, who said in 1936 that it was "grand music and a swell play but the two don't go together" and that Gershwin did not use what Ellington called "the Negro musical idiom."
And when Grace Bumbry played Bess at the Metropolitan Opera, she (somewhat ungraciously) said, "I thought it beneath me, I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come far too far to have to retrogress to 1935."
Harry Belafonte famously turned down the part of Porgy in the film, Sidney Poitier was sorry he accepted it. The film ended up a mess, and the Gershwin estate did their best to pull it from release.
But Paulus and Park did NOT say they were working to eliminate racial stereotypes. If they had, this mess might not have happened. (I still think that task is impossible.) Instead they made broad sweeping statements about how the opera was artistically deficient, as did Audra.
If they were simply making grand statements for the NY Times, they are now hoist but their own pretensions. If they were being disingenuous and they are really trying to erase the stereotypes from the entire opera while claiming to fix artistic flaws, then they are being artistically dishonest.
The interesting question becomes: What is to be done about the inadvertent racism of great works from the past, like Porgy and Bess, Showboat, Treemonisha, Huckleberry Finn--or even Uncle Tom's Cabin? In each of those cases, the writer's intentions were to support emancipation or racial equality, yet in each one of those cases, the works seem racist today.
Can they ever again be received as they were intended?
