Stephen Sondheim’s letter of protest about the revamped ‘Porgy and Bess’

The New York Times reports:

There’s a spank­ing new ver­sion of “Porgy and Bess” on the way, one that seeks to trans­form the clas­sic 1935 opera into a com­mer­cial Broad­way musical. To that end, the dir­ector Diane Paulus and the play­wright Suzan-Lori Parks have added new scenes, punched up some dia­logue, inven­ted bio­graph­ical details and — most rad­ic­ally — added a more upbeat ending.

Stephen Sond­heim is not amused. Here is the the let­ter he wrote to the paper:

The art­icle by Mr. Healy about the com­ing revival of “Porgy and Bess” is dis­may­ing on many levels. To begin with, the title of the show is now “The Ger­sh­wins’ Porgy and Bess.” I assume that’s in case any­one was wor­ried it was the Rodgers and Hart “Porgy and Bess” that was com­ing to town. But what happened to DuBose Hey­ward? Most of the lyr­ics (and all of the good ones) are his alone (“Sum­mer­time,” “My Man’s Gone Now”) or co-written with Ira Ger­sh­win (“Bess, You Is My Woman Now”). If this billing is at the insist­ence of the Ger­sh­win estate, they should be ashamed of them­selves. If it’s the pro­du­cers’ idea, it’s just dumb. More dis­may­ing is the dis­dain that Diane Paulus, Audra McDon­ald and Suzan-Lori Parks feel toward the opera itself.

Ms. Paulus says that in the opera you don’t get to know the char­ac­ters as people. Put­ting it kindly, that’s will­ful ignor­ance. These char­ac­ters are as vivid as any ever cre­ated for the musical theater, as has been proved over and over in pro­duc­tions that may have cut some dia­logue and musical pas­sages but didn’t rewrite and dis­tort them.

What Ms. Paulus wants, and has ordered, are back stor­ies for the char­ac­ters. For example she (or, rather, Ms. Parks) is sup­ply­ing Porgy with dia­logue that will explain how he became crippled. She fails to recog­nize that Porgy, Bess, Crown, Sportin’ Life and the rest are arche­types and inten­ded to be lar­ger than life and that filling in “real­istic” details is likely to reduce them to line draw­ings. It makes you spec­u­late about what would hap­pen if she ever got her hands on “Tosca” and ‘Don Gio­vanni.” How would we get to know them? Ms. Paulus would prob­ably want to add an aria or two to explain how Tosca got to be a star, and she would cer­tainly want some addi­tional mater­ial about Don Giovanni’s unhappy child­hood to explain what made him such an uncon­scion­able lecher.

Then there is Ms. Paulus’s con­des­cen­sion toward the audi­ence. She says, “I’m sorry, but to ask an audi­ence these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an under­stand­able and fully roun­ded char­ac­ter.” I don’t know what she’s sorry about, but I’m glad she can speak for all of us rest­less theat­er­go­ers. If she doesn’t under­stand Bess and feels she has to “excav­ate” the show, she clearly thinks it’s a ruin, so why is she doing it? I’m sorry, but could the prob­lem be her lack of under­stand­ing, not Heyward’s?

She is joined heart­ily in this sen­ti­ment by Ms. McDon­ald, who says that Bess is “often more of a plot device than a full-blooded char­ac­ter.” Often? Mean­ing some­times she’s full-blooded and other times not? She’s always full-blooded when she’s acted full-bloodedly, as she was by, among oth­ers, Clamma Dale and Leontyne Price. Ms. McDon­ald goes on to say, “The opera has the mak­ings of a great love story … that I think we’re bring­ing to life.” Wow, who’d have thought there was a love story hid­ing in “Porgy and Bess” that just needed a group of vis­ion­ar­ies to bring it out?

Among the ways in which Ms. Parks defends the excav­a­tion work is this: “I wanted to flesh out the two main char­ac­ters so that they are not card­board cutout char­ac­ters” and goes on to say, “I think that’s what George Ger­sh­win wanted, and if he had lived longer he would have gone back to the story of ‘Porgy and Bess’ and made changes, includ­ing the ending.”

It’s reas­sur­ing that Ms. Parks has a dir­ect pipeline to Ger­sh­win and is just car­ry­ing out his work for him, and that she thinks he would have taken one of the most mov­ing moments in musical theater his­tory — Porgy’s demand, “Bring my goat!” — and thrown it out. Ms. Parks (or Ms. Paulus) has taken away Porgy’s goat cart in favor of a cane. So now he can demand, “Bring my cane!” Per­haps someone will bring him a straw hat too, so he can buck-and-wing his way to New York.

Or per­haps in order to have her happy end­ing, she’ll have Bess turn around when she gets as far as Phil­adelphia and return to Cat­fish Row in time for the finale, thus sav­ing Porgy the trouble of his heroic jour­ney to New York. It will kill “I’m on My Way,” but who cares?

Ms. McDon­ald imme­di­ately dis­misses any pos­sible cri­ti­cism by labeling any­one who might have objec­tions to what Ms. Paulus and her col­leagues are doing as “Ger­sh­win pur­ists” — clearly a group, all of whom think alike, and we all know what a “pur­ist” is, don’t we? An inflex­ible, aca­demic reac­tion­ary fuddy-duddy who lacks the ima­gin­a­tion to see bey­ond the author’s inten­tions, who doesn’t recog­nize all “the holes and issues” that Ms. Paulus and Ms. McDon­ald and Suzan-Lori Parks do. Never fear, though. They con­fid­ently claim that they know how to fix this dread­fully flawed work.

I can hear the out­raged cries now about stifling cre­ativ­ity and dis­cour­aging dir­ect­ors who want to rein­ter­pret plays and music­als in order to bring “fresh per­spect­ives,” as they are wont to say, but there is a dif­fer­ence between rein­ter­pret­a­tion and whole­sale rewrit­ing. Nor am I judging this pro­duc­tion in advance, only the atti­tude of its cre­at­ors toward the piece and the audi­ence. Per­haps it will be won­der­ful. Cer­tainly I can think of no bet­ter Porgy than Norm Lewis nor a bet­ter Bess than Audra McDon­ald, whose voice is one of the glor­ies of the Amer­ican theater. Per­haps Ms. Paulus and com­pany will have earned their arrogance.

Which brings me back to my open­ing point. In the interest of truth in advert­ising, let it not be called “The Ger­sh­wins’ Porgy and Bess,” nor even “The Gershwin-Heyward Porgy and Bess.” Advert­ise it hon­estly as “Diane Paulus’s Porgy and Bess.” And the hell with the real one.

via New York Times

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