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

of Studies in American Music in Gershwin’s beloved New York City. At this screening, Foster Hirsch, a professor of film studies at Brooklyn College, where the film was shown, offered appreciative reflections on the film. His thoughtful appraisal implicitly contradicts the attitudes of Leonore Gershwin that continue to be enforced by the Gershwin estate:

Preminger’s direction is intensely cinematic, his approach far more sophisticated than that of a filmed play. Replacing passages of recitative with dialogue, he has made no attempt to present the material as an opera…. With his august presence and speaking voice, Poitier is a remote, dignified Porgy, a survivor. In effective contrast, Dandridge is an anguished Bess victimized by her beauty as well as her race and gender. Quite contrary to its tarnished reputation, Preminger’s film is a magisterial pageant, a ceremonial work deeply respectful both to the intentions of Gershwin and his collaborators and to its black subjects…. This “forbidden” text demands to be shown exactly as it is here, on a large screen and with a sound system that can do justice to what may well be the most glorious theatrical work by an American composer.25

The overview in this chapter seconds Hirsch’s opinion. Despite its flaws, Goldwyn’s Porgy and Bess should not be sequestered in the Library of Congress. It deserves to be seen and heard.

EMI Classics, 1993

The first version of Porgy and Bess (1959) marked a return to the approach popularized in the Crawford revival in the early 1940s. The 1970s introduced the first recorded uncut Porgy and Bess, and the 1980s brought the uncut opera to the stages of the Metropolitan and Glyndebourne. But it was not until 1993 that this increasingly preferred version of the work reached the screen. This film, videotaped in a television studio, was based on the 1986 Glyndebourne production staged by Trevor Nunn, known to the world of Broadway through his direction of Cats and most recently Sunset Boulevard.

By filming in a studio, Nunn was able to visually expand the world of Catfish Row, especially by taking advantage of a television studio’s ability to depict realistic waterways and other humanly constructed natural surroundings. In an unusual move, the cast—with few exceptions the same as that of the 1986 stage production—lip-synched to their own voices in the acclaimed 1989 London Philharmonic recording conducted by Simon Rattle. Four singers, most importantly Bruce Hubbard (Jake) who had died, were replaced by new actors.

Porgy and Bess, 1993 film. Porgy (Willard White) casting away his crutches.

Porgy and Bess, 1993 film. Porgy (White) begins his long journey to New York City.

For the most part, the television film, unlike its 1959 predecessor readily available on DVD, for the first time offered the complete opera as seen and heard onstage a few years earlier. All that is missing is the “Buzzard Song” in act II, scene 1, one of the cuts made shortly before the Broadway debut, and the opening of the final scene, act III, scene 3, which shows the citizens of Catfish Row waking up just prior to Porgy’s return from his week in jail for refusing to look at Crown’s dead body (ironically a scene partly visible in the otherwise heavily cut version of this scene in the Preminger film).26 It is not clear whether the stage version also cut these opening moments of act III, scene 3, but the 1989 recording and probably the Glyndebourne staging did contain the “Buzzard Song.” Surely its deletion cannot be attributed to its length or the possible strains it might place on a dubbed singing voice. The absence of the “Buzzard Song” and perhaps the opening of the final scene explains why the 1993 DVD clocks in at five minutes less than the 189 minutes of the 1989 recording, which provided the soundtrack for both.

In addition to the film’s nearly complete performance state, some of its length can be attributed to tempos slower than those of recordings made between 1935 and 1942. The faster tempos of these older recordings hold to the historical performance movement truism that older is faster, a belief that is belied by the Avalon quartet’s leisurely film rendition of Porter’s “There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair” (see the discussion of the 1936 film Anything Goes). At the outset of the opera, Harolyn Blackwell’s performance of “Summertime” runs two minutes and forty seconds; this is nearly a minute longer than it took the original Clara, Abbie Mitchell, to sing the song at a rehearsal performance recorded on July 19, 1935. The first commercially recorded Clara, Helen Jepson, one year later clocked in at six seconds slower than Mitchell, and when the first Bess, Anne Brown, recorded the song in 1942, her time was ten seconds longer than Mitchell.27 Like “Ol’ Man River” before it, this particular song had by then become the signature moment of the entire work, and slowing it down gives it more dramatic weight, if not always more interest.

A central decision in Nunn’s stage and film versions was to raise Porgy off his knees and take away his goat and his goat cart. Although Nunn’s Porgy is deformed and limps around on crutches, his standing posture presents a new view of the character, symbolically and literally raising his stature. At the end of the opera Porgy even throws down the crutches as he begins his slow and painful journey (on foot rather than by goat cart) to retrieve Bess in New York City. The removal of the goat necessitated a few line changes (e.g., in the final scene the coroner refers to Porgy as the beggar man instead of the goat man), but the effect is largely a visual and psychological one. Other dramatically significant visual revisions include Bess’s unmistakable flirtation with Robbins, which provides a motivation for Crown to murder him in the first scene that goes beyond a simple argument over a crap shoot as well as the decision to show Crown hobbling on to Kittiwah Island at the end of