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

Ira and Leonore Gershwin in 1974, two years before the work returned to its operatic roots with the Houston Opera production. Sometime between 1959 and 1974, Ira and Leonore, or at least Ira, experienced a change of heart about the work.

Since neither Poitier nor Dandridge was a singer, their songs were dubbed. Goldwyn attempted to complement their speaking voices musically and to use African-American opera singers whenever possible for all the major roles. The voice of Porgy was Robert McFerrin. Although today less well known than his son Bobby McFerrin, in his own time the senior McFerrin had an impressive and distinguished career. Among other achievements, he became the first black male to sing at the Metropolitan Opera—in January 1955, the same month that the first African-American female to perform there, Marian Anderson, made her debut. The following year McFerrin sang the title role, in Verdi’s Rigoletto, at the Met. The voice of Bess was Adele Addison, a versatile singer of opera and concert literature, perhaps best known today for her recordings of Baroque literature. Leontyne Price, the much-acclaimed Bess of the Breen-Davis stage Bess, was invited but declined to dub the role for Dandridge. In any event, Addison, whose operatic roles included Gilda and Micaela (Price was noted for her Aïda onstage and Carmen on recordings), possessed a lighter lyric soprano sound than Price and thus matched Dandridge’s speaking voice more closely.

Sammy Davis Jr., Sporting Life, widely praised for his “new sinister spin to the character (thus establishing a precedent for later interpretations),” did his own singing for the film.18 Since contractual agreements precluded the use of his voice on Columbia records, however, Cab Calloway, the Breen-Davis Sporting Life, is the voice heard on the album soundtrack. Brock Peters (Crown), who played the falsely accused rapist in the film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and sang the lead role in the Broadway revival and the screen version of Lost in the Stars in the 1970s, sang for himself in the Porgy and Bess film. The Maria was Pearl Bailey, the role created both in the 1927 play and the opera by the non-singing precocious rapper Georgette Harvey. Unlike Harvey, Bailey, a leading popular singer and one of the stars of St. Louis Woman on Broadway in the 1940s, was featured as a soloist to augment what was a choral number onstage, “I Can’t Sit Down.” One year earlier, in the film adaptation of South Pacific, Juanita Hall, acclaimed on Broadway for her creation of Bloody Mary, had suffered the indignity of being replaced on the soundtrack. Diahann Carroll as Clara, the mother who sings “Summertime,” did not sing Clara onstage, but she was nonetheless an able singer who before long would record an album of Porgy and Bess songs and even starred in a Tony Award–winning performance of Richard Rodgers’s No Strings; even so, she was similarly replaced on the Porgy soundtrack. Peters, Bailey, and Carroll, along with Dandridge were all alumni of Otto Preminger’s 1954 film Carmen Jones, the film adaptation of Hammerstein’s 1940s Broadway hit reinterpretation of Bizet’s opera Carmen.

Sammy Davis Jr. eagerly campaigned for the role of Sporting Life but others, most prominently Harry Belafonte, who had played Joe (Don José) in Preminger’s Carmen Jones, turned down offers to appear in Goldwyn’s Porgy and Bess. Whether as a result of manipulation by his agent or Goldwyn, threats to his career, or a combination of these, the initially reluctant Poitier eventually capitulated. This is what he said at a news conference held on December 10, 1957, six months before shooting was scheduled to begin:

I have never, to my conscious knowledge, done anything that I thought would be injurious to anyone—particularly to my own people. Now this is a personal choice. I do not pretend to be the conscience of all Negroes…. I was convinced irrevocably that it will be a great motion picture and tremendous entertainment and that it will be enjoyed by everyone—little and big—people of all races and creeds.19

Poitier even went as far as asserting that Goldwyn and Mamoulian were “almost as sensitive” as he was to the dangers of portraying racial stereotypes in popular culture.

The film inevitably shared some of the stereotypes that characterize the opera. The characters are uneducated; Sporting Life is a pimp, drug dealer, and an atheist; and Bess is a former prostitute and drug addict, but nonetheless a relatively sedate progenitor of Mimi in Jonathan Larson’s Rent.20 Crown is a murderer. Sporting Life’s evil qualities may have been magnified in the film, but Dandridge’s Bess was accused of being too elegant and gentle. In response to the Production Code, if not the demands of the story, Porgy seems to be sleeping on the floor and not directly adjacent to his own bed, which is occupied by Bess. Missing from the film are not only the “Buzzard Song” but other remnants of Porgy’s superstitions. Serena refuses Bess’s money for the burial of her husband Robbins, who was murdered in a drunken rage by Bess’s Crown; she later accuses Bess of being unfit to mother Clara’s baby. The film introduces a genuine Christian preacher on Kittiwah Island as a foil for Sporting Life’s blasphemous “It Ain’t Necessarily So” (followed by an exuberant, almost orgiastic dance that was not in the opera, in a jazz arrangement more 1950s than 1930s in style). These added touches clarify that Christian values are preferred to those of Sporting Life and his followers. The crooked lawyer Frazier is entirely absent, as is Archdale, the benevolent white man whose parents were slave owners who once owned the parents of Peter, the Honey Man. The film also greatly reduced the amount of dialect heard in both the spoken dialogue and the songs themselves. In short, Porgy and Bess may be rightly interpreted as full of arguably demeaning stereotypes, but the film version was demonstrably far less so. Nevertheless, after its initial release and nationally televised broadcast in 1967, the Gershwin estate chose to suppress this historic cinematic