NEW YORK -- It's still summertime, but living is anything but easy around the Broadway-bound revival of "Porgy and Bess."
Since reports surfaced about a drastic makeover planned for George and Ira Gershwin's 1935 landmark "folk opera" about poor blacks on Catfish Row, smoke can be seen spewing from the ears of outraged admirers - including the impeccable ears of a furious Stephen Sondheim.
It may seem ridiculous to be arguing about a production that isn't even scheduled to open on Broadway until mid-January.
The controversy may be premature, but it is hardly unprovoked. The fury involves radical revisions announced by director Diane Paulus ("Hair") and her creative team in American Theatre magazine, The Boston Globe and, most explosively, The New York Times.
Indeed, the changes sound enormous. Porgy, the crippled beggar who loves the fast-living Bess, uses a cane instead of a goat-drawn cart. Bess gets softened as a rape victim instead of a woman complicitous in her seduction. And the ambiguous ending, where Porgy sets out to find Bess, has been turned into a happy one.
For starters, George Gershwin's magnificent music is being rearranged and reharmonized, half-sung introductions to songs are being replaced by new dialogue, lyrics by brother Ira and DuBose Heyward are being revised. Even the ravishing "Summertime" is being turned into a duet with an accordion because, according to musical adapter Diedre Murray, it's too high for a lullaby.
Denigrating the original
What's burning people, I believe, is less the specific changes than what Sondheim, in a scorching letter to the Times, refers to as the "disdain" for the original expressed by Paulus, Pulitzer Prize-winning adapter Suzan-Lori Parks and four-time Tony winner Audra McDonald, who plays Bess.
In The Boston Globe, Paulus says she wants people to leave the production saying, "I never knew 'Porgy and Bess' had such a great story." Tell that to the millions who have loved this piece in theaters and opera houses for more than 75 years, not to mention the voters who awarded the 1977 Broadway production the Tony for best revival.
Parks refers to "I Got Plenty o' Nuttin'" as "the happy darky song." McDonald describes a "sort of Sambo-type racist take" that must be changed to make it "palatable to 21st century audiences."
Yes, there has always been a queasy side of "Porgy," a work about blacks in a South Carolina slum by citified Jews from Brooklyn.
But isn't it possible for Parks and Murray, who are black, to adjust the offending racial anachronisms without having Parks dismiss these heart-shredding characters as "cardboard" and Paulus describe the ravishing choruses as "background window dressing"? No less a racial barometer than Langston Hughes, in 1954, had his reservations about the message of "Porgy and Bess" but called the work "terrific ... one of the most dramatic of American music plays."
