Good Morning POU!
Last week we featured some great movie musicals in the afternoon thread. Today we’re gonna celebrate another classic that has been featured numerous times on broadway, film and stages around the world many times, the great Gershwin classic: Porgy and Bess.
Set in the early 1900s in the fictional Catfish Row section of Charleston, South Carolina, which serves as home to a black fishing community, the story focuses on the titular characters, crippled beggar Porgy, who travels about in a goat-drawn cart, and the drug-addicted Bess, who lives with stevedore Crown, the local bully. While high on cocaine supplied by Sportin’ Life, Crown kills Robbins after the latter vanquishes him in a craps game; Bess urges Crown to flee. Sportin’ Life suggests she accompany him to New York City, an offer Bess declines. She seeks refuge with her neighbors, all of whom refuse to help her. Porgy finally agrees to let her stay with him.
Summertime
Bess and Porgy settle into domestic life together and soon fall in love. Just before a church picnic on Kittiwah Island, Sportin’ Life once again approaches Bess, but Porgy warns him to leave her alone. Bess wishes to stay with Porgy, since he cannot attend the picnic because of his disability, but he urges her to go. After the picnic ends, and before Bess can leave, Crown, who has been hiding in the woods on the island, confronts her. She initially struggles to resist him but Crown rapes her. The others, not knowing exactly what has happened, leave and return to the mainland.
It Ain’t Necessarily So
Two days later, Bess returns to Catfish Row in a state of delirium. When she recovers, she remembers what happened. Feeling that she betrayed Porgy, she begs his forgiveness. She admits she is unable to resist Crown and asks Porgy to protect her from him. Crown eventually returns to claim his woman, and when he draws his knife, Porgy strangles him. He is detained by the police merely to identify the body, but Sportin’ Life, who has fed Bess cocaine, convinces her Porgy inadvertently will reveal himself to be the murderer. In her drugged state, she finally accepts his offer to take her to New York. When Porgy returns and discovers she is gone, he sets off to find her.
My Man’s Gone Now
Controversy
Because of its themes of fornication, drug addiction, prostitution, violence, and murder, Porgy and Bess proved to be difficult to cast. Many black actors felt the story did nothing but perpetuate negative stereotypes. Harry Belafonte thought the role of Porgy was demeaning and declined it. So many performers refused to participate in the project that Goldwyn actually considered Jackie Robinson, Sugar Ray Robinson and singer Clyde McPhatter for major roles. Only Las Vegas entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. expressed interest in appearing in the film, and arranged to audition for a role during a party at Judy Garland’s home. Ira Gershwin’s wife Lee was present and, horrified by Davis’ vulgarity, implored Goldwyn, “Swear on your life you’ll never use him.” The producer, who sneeringly called Davis “that monkey,” buy viagra with prescription assured her he would not cast him and offered the role of Sportin’ Life to Cab Calloway instead. When Calloway declined, Davis had Frank Sinatra and some of his associates pressure Goldwyn, who finally announced to Davis, “The part is yours. Now will you get all these guys off my back?”
Goldwyn offered Sidney Poitier $75,000 to portray Porgy. The actor had serious reservations about the role and turned it down, but his agent led Goldwyn to believe she could persuade her client to star in the film. She proved to be unsuccessful, and Goldwyn threatened to sue the actor for breaching an oral contract. When Poitier realized his refusal to star in Porgy might jeopardize his appearance in the Stanley Kramer film The Defiant Ones, he reconsidered and grudgingly accepted, assuring Goldwyn he would “do the part to the best of my ability – under the circumstances.”
Goldwyn’s first and only choice for Bess was Dorothy Dandridge, who accepted the role without enthusiasm. Her Carmen Jones co-stars Pearl Bailey, Brock Peters, and Diahann Carroll also accepted roles, but all of them had concerns about how their characters would be portrayed. Bailey warned costume designer Irene Sharaff she would not wear any bandannas because she was unwilling to look like Aunt Jemima.
The opera, which features some of the most recognizable songs in all of American music, has been praised as a bold attempt to exalt African American vernacular in the operatic canon, and pilloried as a patronizing, if not outright racist, caricature of black life in the South in the early 20th century. Even some of the black performers who have most ably filled principal roles in the opera through the years have voiced their reservations about the work.
Bess You Is My Woman Now
The great St. Louis-born mezzo-soprano Grace Bumbry, for example, said of her own experience playing and singing the part of Bess: “I thought it beneath me. I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come far too far to have to retrogress to 1935. My way of dealing with it was to see that it was really a piece of Americana, of American history, whether we liked it or not. Whether I sing it or not, it was still going to be there.”
Bumbry’s attitude is, arguably, the same that most people have chosen to take to the work. The opera might be filled with racial stereotypes; the songs might glorify the basest (quasi-mythical) aspects of black culture; the characters might be emblematic of African American “types” anchored not so much in history as in the dominant culture’s notion of that history — all that might be true, but the opera also, all these decades later, somehow endures. It has seen several revivals on Broadway (most recently in 2011) and musicians and singers as diverse as Miles Davis, Jascha Heifetz and Christina Aguilera have performed or recorded their own variations on the opera’s famous tunes.
Oh Lawd I’m On My Way
See rare photos from the movie set via Life Magazine here.