Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

undergo a rigorous Broadway apprenticeship that eventually gave him the technique and the experience he needed to attempt a full-length opera in the European tradition, again using the black experience for subject matter.

By 1924, with Lady, Be Good!, George had found a first-rate lyricist in his brother Ira (1896–1983), and over the next decade the Gershwins produced mostly successful musical comedies filled with great songs and great stars such as Tip-Toes (1925) with Queenie Smith, Oh, Kay! (1926) with Gertrude Lawrence, Funny Face (1927) with Lady, Be Good! leads Fred and Adele Astaire, and Girl Crazy (1930) with new stars Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers. All of these shows were produced by Alex Aarons (who had independently presented George’s first book musical La La Lucille in 1919) and Vinton Freedley.5 From 1930 to 1933 the Gershwins created a trilogy of musicals that satirized contemporary politics: Strike Up the Band (1930), Of Thee I Sing (1931), and Let ’Em Eat Cake (1933). In addition to the opportunities they provided for musical humor and wit, these political musicals allowed Gershwin to continue the practice he started in Oh, Kay!, in which extended ensemble finales are presented continuously with a minimum of intervening dialogue.

George and Ira Gershwin. © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK. WWW.ALHIRSCHFELD.COM

The act I Finale to Of Thee I Sing also displays a substantial passage of accompanied recitative or arioso (a singing style between recitative and aria). This passage is sung by Diana Devereaux, the character who, by winning first prize in a national beauty contest, was entitled to become the First Lady but was passed over in favor of Mary Turner because the latter could make irresistible corn muffins. When instead of muffins Diana serves President Wintergreen a summons for breach of promise, Gershwin gives the jilted Southerner a blues-inflected musical line in recitative that would not be out of place in Porgy and Bess.

When Gershwin finished reading the novel Porgy (1925) by DuBose Heyward (1885–1940) after a sleepless night in October 1926, he wrote a letter to the author, a leading Southern novelist and poet, informing him that he wanted to use the novel as the basis for an opera. Nine years later Porgy and Bess appeared on Broadway, a delay that can be contributed both to the successful run of the Theatre Guild production of the play Porgy in 1927 and to Gershwin’s many commitments and excuses and his sense that he needed more experience before tackling a full-scale opera.

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