The Return of Porgy

By William Bender

George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess --that wondrous mix of jazz, blues, gospel, Broadway and European romanticism--is a treasure that has been hoarded too long. Productions have been rare over the past two decades, and not all that frequent during Porgy's 41 years of life. Now there is a new version that is really worth seeing and hearing. Surprisingly, at least to those unattuned to the activities of General Director David Gockley, it comes from the Houston Grand Opera, where the show last week completed an eight-day run. With former American Ballet Theater President Sherwin Goldman joining in as coproducer, Porgy this week begins a six-week engagement at Philadelphia's Academy of Music, and after that it will move to the Wolf Trap center outside Washington, D.C., then to Toronto and Ottawa. If enough people like it during the tour, Porgy will come to Broadway in the fall, where it ran for 124 performances in 1935-36 and again for 305 performances in 1953.

Lowdown Blues. Likable it certainly is. This production, though sometimes lethargic, comes closer to the original conception of Gershwin and Librettist DuBose Heyward than any previous stage version. Houston's key decision was to treat Porgy and Bess as a real opera rather than a somewhat fancy Broadway musical. That meant restoring a good deal of rarely heard music. Gershwin's recitatives have traditionally been replaced by spoken dialogue. Most productions have entirely eliminated a brief, sensual scene showing the night life of Charleston, with the character Jasbo Brown playing some lowdown blues on a splendidly out-of-tune upright piano. They also usually omit Porgy's superstitious "Buzzard Song" ("Once de buzzard fold his wing an' light over yo' house/ All yo' happiness done dead") as well as several chunks of the last scene. All that restored material does make for a three-hour-long evening (Houston, wisely perhaps, has reconsidered and scrapped a few of the restorations), but it is well worth the time.

Since Porgy's music makes the same demands on singers as does any other opera, Houston has assembled two sets of soloists to alternate the roles of Porgy, Bess and Serena. Both are fine, but it is the first-night cast that will be especially remembered. Tall, willowy, insinuating Clamma Dale, a Juilliard School graduate who made her debut with the New York City Opera last fall, is a marvelous Bess. At 28 she has a luscious soprano voice that has a little bit of the young Leontyne Price in it and soon ought to be just right for Verdi and Puccini.

Porgy is the first major role for Louisiana-born Donnie Ray Albert, 26. He is a find. As the crippled hero he acts on his knees better than most young operatic hopefuls do on their feet, and he has a booming bass-baritone voice. Wilma Shakesnider has just the right blend of vibrant lyricism and common-sense demeanor to make Serena an appropriately righteous foil to Bess. Larry Marshall's Sportin' Life could use a touch more evil but is admirable in his dandified elusiveness. The depth of this cast is suggested by the presence of the veteran contralto Carol Brice, a regular on the concert scene since the 1940s, in the minor role of a neighborhood scold named Maria.

Despite Gershwin's use of the phrase, Porgy is not a folk opera--and particularly not a black folk opera. Such a notion implies a kind of ground-level realism that is just not there. Porgy is simply a fable about man's innocence in a hard and corrupting world. There is no reason, therefore, for contemporary audiences to be troubled by the fact that most of the inhabitants of Catfish Row are stereotypes, and condescending ones at that. Mozart's Turks are stereotypes too, as are Verdi's gypsies, Puccini's gunslingers and, for that matter, Wagner's gods and gnomes. As with all opera, the message of Porgy and Bess lies in the music. The songs have long had lives of their own (what jazz musician has not improvised on Summertime or It Ain 't Necessarily So?), but up there onstage is where Gershwin's triumphant work deserves its place of honor.

When Porgy and Bess reaches Wolf Trap late in August, the operetta El Capitan by John Philip Sousa will be playing near by at Washington's Kennedy Center. What the two productions have in common is that they originated in Houston under the venturesome eye of a reformed baritone who, if no longer a boy at 33, is one of the wonders of American opera.

When David Gockley took over as general director of the Houston Grand Opera in 1972, the company was giving 27 performances a year to an audience of 60,000 on a budget of $520,000. This season it gave 248 performances to 260,000 listeners at a cost of $2.1 million (without a deficit). One reason for this growth was Gockley's introduction, in his first season, of an "American series" of operas in English. Cast mostly with young American singers and priced at budget levels (as low as $1.60 a ticket), this series alternates with the original-language performances, and has attracted a new segment of the Houston community. Gockley's three-year-old Texas Opera Theater, a touring subsidiary that also uses young American artists, now gives close to 200 performances a year in Texas and five nearby states. Another innovation: the free, outdoor Spring Opera Festival, where Gockley first staged Scott Joplin's long-neglected Treemonisha in 1975. Gockley is perhaps the only opera director in the U.S. trained in both music and business. Born in Philadelphia, he studied composition and conducting at Brown, voice at the New England Conservatory of Music and then got a master's at the Columbia Graduate School of Business in 1970. In his first job at New York's Lincoln Center, he soon became involved in a corporate fund raising drive.

Bold Ideas. The reputation of Texans being what it is, Gockley may have gone to Houston thinking that plenty of money would be easily available. Not so. He soon encountered a lingering frontier mentality ("I made mine, son, now you make yours") and a feeling that, as Gockley puts it, "it was nice to keep the opera small, exclusive, uncontroversial." With his bold ideas and persuasive ways, David Gockley has begun to change all that.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.