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

Since the late 1970s the prevailing view holds that an uncut version of Gershwin’s rehearsal vocal score best represents the composer’s final intentions for the work. The more complete, the more authentic. For this reason few of the cuts noted by Hamm are in fact observed in current productions (although interestingly the video directed by Trevor Nunn in 1993 omitted the “Buzzard Song”); virtually none are observed in the three recordings of the work.50 The merits of the cuts can and should be argued on aesthetic as well as historical grounds, and perhaps Porgy’s cuts should be disregarded, especially on recordings, which are less beholden to the time constraints of a Broadway production. But any careful consideration must acknowledge that the published score does not represent what Theatre Guild audiences heard during the initial run and may be alien to Gershwin’s considered thoughts on the work.

Race

The criticism leveled at Gershwin for making his Broadway opera through-composed and for straddling two worlds with his concoction of sung speech and hit songs has somewhat abated in recent years. More persistently controversial is Gershwin’s claim that his “folk opera” expressed the African-American experience. Criticisms of Gershwin’s racial presumptions appeared as early as the 1935 Broadway premiere, but in contrast to the gradual tolerance and eventual appreciation of his musical ambitions and the work’s length, the hubris of Gershwin’s depiction of black culture has not diminished over time despite the proliferation of performances throughout the world.51 In fact, the growing “classic” stature of Porgy and Bess may actually have fueled racial controversies in recent years to a point that the problems brought about by what is perceived as cultural colonization and exploitation seems destined to remain central to the work in the minds of many for some time to come.52

In chapter 2 it was noted that the creators and future producers of Show Boat made some revisions in response to evolving racial sensibilities. Hammerstein replaced the word “niggers” with “coloured folks” as early as the 1928 London production (“colored” in 1946) as the first words of the show. For his screenplay to the 1936 film Hammerstein substituted “Darkies all work on de Mississippi,” and in the 1946 film biography of Kern audiences heard “Here we all work on de Mississippi.” Miles Kreuger wrote that in a 1966 Lincoln Center revival, “Nobody works on the Mississippi, because the Negro chorus was omitted altogether from the opening number.”53 In the 1994 Broadway revival directed by Hal Prince, “Brothers all work on the Mississippi.”

Accounts of the genesis of McGlinn’s recording of the “authentic” Show Boat of 1927 report that the contracted African-American chorus refused to sing the offending word “niggers” and therefore was replaced by the Ambrosian Chorus, who had been contracted to sing the white choral parts. To show his solidarity with the black chorus, Willard White, the Joe for this recording, resigned, and only after consultation with Eartha Kitt, a black performer and an articulate and influential opponent of racial indignities, did Bruce Hubbard consent to sing the role of Joe and the word “niggers.” Earlier, Etta Moten Barnett, who sang Bess in the popular 1942 revival of Porgy and Bess, recalled that the cast “refused to used the word ‘nigger,’ and it was removed from all of the lines except those spoken by white characters.”54 Some stage productions (and the 1951 film) of Show Boat circumvented the issue by minimizing the role of blacks, but this type of evasive action was, of course, impossible to accomplish with Porgy and Bess, Thus, from his time to ours, Gershwin’s opera has been chastised for its composer’s presumption to speak for another race.

Thomson in his 1935 review takes Gershwin to task for attempting a folk subject: “Folklore subjects recounted by an outsider are only valid as long as the folk in question is unable to speak for itself, which is certainly not true of the American Negro in 1935.”55 A more detailed and closely reasoned critique of what Thomson termed “fake folk-lore” can be found in a review of the opera by Hall Johnson that appeared in the African-American journal Opportunity a few months after the Theatre Guild premiere.56 As the composer of The Green Pastures (1930) and Run, Little Chillun! (1933), two undisputed examples of authentic black folklore, Johnson’s credentials were impeccable for this task.

Although Johnson, like Downes and Thomson, criticizes Gershwin’s craftsmanship, again mainly in the recitatives, most of his remarks focus on Gershwin’s misunderstanding of the African-American character and experience.57 According to Johnson, the first of Gershwin’s many inauthentic elements is his failure to capture “Negro simplicity.” For Johnson, Gershwin’s music “suggests sophisticated intricacies of attitude which could not possibly be native to the minds of the people who make up his story.”58 What makes the work “genuine” are the performances, particularly that of John W. Bubbles, of the vaudeville team Buck and Bubbles, who as Sporting Life played the central non-operatic character among the leading players. But despite Bubbles’s genuineness, Johnson viewed “It Ain’t Necessarily So” as “so un-Negroid, in thought and in structure that even Bubbles cannot save it.”59 On the other hand, perhaps because its derivations were more urban than folk, Johnson praises the authenticity of Sporting Life’s “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York” as a “real Negro gem.”60

Criticism of Porgy and Bess on racial grounds reached a new level of intensity in the 1950s and 1960s, the era of Brown v. Board of Education and the civil rights struggles for equality. Many blacks resented the fact that the State Department, in sponsoring a global tour in 1952, was propagating negative stereotypes. On a televised broadcast playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of Raisin in the Sun, criticized Otto Preminger, director of the 1959 film version of the opera, for “portraying Negroes at their worst.”61 A. S. “Doc” Young wrote in the Los Angeles Sentinel that Porgy and Bess “is completely out of context with modern times … it perpetuates old stereotypes that right-thinking people have buried long