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George Gershwin miraculously melded classical music, popular song, jazz, blues
and spirituals in this quintessentially American masterpiece that tells the poignant
story of a crippled beggar, the headstrong woman he loves, and the community
that sustains them both. General Director David Gockley, whose association with
Porgy and Bess has restored it to a mainstay of the operatic repertoire, presents
director Francesca Zambello's critically acclaimed production. Alan Rich of LA
Weekly calls her staging "by some distance, the finest and most enjoyable of the
couple of dozen productions I have attended of Porgy and Bess." George Gershwin miraculously melded classical music, popular song, jazz, blues
and spirituals in this quintessentially American masterpiece that tells the poignant
story of a crippled beggar, the headstrong woman he loves, and the community
that sustains them both. General Director David Gockley, whose association with
Porgy and Bess has restored it to a mainstay of the operatic repertoire, presents
director Francesca Zambello's critically acclaimed production. Alan Rich of LA
Weekly calls her staging "by some distance, the finest and most enjoyable of the
couple of dozen productions I have attended of Porgy and Bess." ACT I
Scene 1
As the curtain rises following a brief overture, the night life of Catfish Row is seen. A crap game is in progress, a piano plays a "low-down blues," and Clara sings a lullaby ("Summertime") to her baby. Bess's boyfriend Crown, who is drunk, becomes enraged by a minor incident and kills Robbins. Serena weeps over the body of her husband. Before making his escape, Crown tells Bess to wait for his return. Sportin' Life offers Bess refuge after she begs for some "happy dust," but she chooses to hide in Porgy's room, not suspecting that the crippled beggar loves her.
Scene 2
Robbins is laid out for the wake with a saucer on his chest to collect funds for his burial. The police arrive and accuse Peter, an old man, of murdering Robbins. Naming Crown as the killer, Peter is taken to jail as a material witness while Serena mourns ("My Man's Gone Now"). Final arrangements for the funeral are made, and the scene ends with the spiritual "Leavin' for the Promised Land."
Scene 3
Jake and the other fishermen repair their nets before they go fishing ("It Takes a Long Pull to Get There"). Jake's wife, Clara, pleads with him not to go. Porgy is at his window ("I Got Plenty o' Nuttin"), displaying his happiness now that Bess has come to live with him. Maria upbraids Sportin' Life, forbidding him to peddle his "happy dust" to her friends. The charlatan lawyer Frazier appears to sell Bess a "divorce" from Crown, although the two were never legally married. Porgy, taken in by Frazier's slick talk, is inveigled to pay even more for Bess's "divorce" because of this complication. A large buzzard flies overhead, frightening the crowd as Porgy explains, "Once de buzzard fold his wing an 'light over yo' house, all yo' happiness done dead." In the now empty courtyard Sportin' Life makes advances towards Bess. Porgy orders Sportin' Life to stay away from her. Alone, Porgy and Bess express their love ("Bess, You is my Woman"), and Bess reluctantly leaves Porgy to go to the picnic with Maria.
ACT II
Scene 1
A picnic on Kittiwah Island is in full swing. Sportin' Life entertains the group with his cynical attitude toward religion ("It Ain't Necessarily So"). As the picknickers climb aboard the boat for the trip home, Crown appears before Bess. She argues that she now belongs to Porgy, but is overpowered and seduced by Crown.
Scene 2
A week has passed and Peter has been released. Bess is sick and delirious in Porgy's room, where Porgy and Serena pray for her. Street sounds are heard and Bess calls out for Porgy. She recovers and expresses her feelings ("I Loves You, Porgy"), but their joy quickly turns into fear as the dreaded hurricane bell is rung.
Scene 3
Gathered in Serena's room as the hurricane blows, the women are concerned about their men who have gone fishing. Clara is particularly upset as she senses her husband Jake is in danger. Crown bursts into the room and he and Porgy quarrel. The distraught Clara gives her baby to Bess and rushes out into the storm in search of her husband. Before leaving, Crown warns Bess that he will return for her.
Scene 4
The chorus is mourning Clara, Jake, and Crown, all thought to be lost in the storm. Sportin' Life enters, laughing cynically and alluding to Bess having "two men." Bess, holding Clara's baby, sings "Summertime." When the courtyard is empty, Crown enters furtively, crawling toward Porgy's window. But Porgy surprises him and kills him with his powerful hands. As the scene ends, Porgy laughs triumphantly.
Scene 5
The police come to Catfish Row to investigate the murder and order Porgy to come with them to identify the body. As soon as Porgy is taken away, Sportin' Life persuades the confused and distressed Bess that Porgy will be locked up, never to return. Offering her some "happy dust," Sportin' Life convinces Bess to go away with him ("There's a Boat Dat's Leavin' Soon for New York").
Scene 6
A week later Porgy returns home. He calls for Bess. Discovering she has gone to New York, Porgy sets out to find her. As he passes the gate, the chorus joins him in "Oh Lawd, I'm On My Way."
George Gershwin and his brother Ira were at the creative forefront of American musical theater in the 1920s, an era which contained a variety of entertainment forms including European operetta, revues, farces, extravaganzas, vaudeville and musical comedies. In the middle of the decade, George Gershwin saw the play Porgy by DuBose Heyward (1885-1940), based on the newspaper account of a crippled black man, “Goat Sammy” or Samuel Smalls, who had assaulted a woman and tried to escape from the police on his goat cart. Some years later, in March of 1932, Gershwin wrote to Heyward, “I am … thinking of ideas for new compositions. I came back to one that I had several years ago—namely Porgy—it is still the most outstanding play that I know about the colored people.”
Around the same time, George Gershwin had been commissioned to compose a work for the Metropolitan Opera, based on The Dybbuk. When he failed to obtain the rights to the piece, he proposed Porgy and Bess to the Met instead, but the suggestion was refused because of the nature of the subject matter—a decision that resulted in the evolution of the piece away from the operatic genre and towards becoming a Broadway show. At the beginning of November 1933, the Theatre Guild announced that it would produce an operatic version of Porgy to be written by the Gershwins and the Heywards. From December 1933, George made several visits to Charleston in order to work with Heyward, who had grown up in Charleston, South Carolina, and incorporated childhood memories and the hurricane of 1911 into Porgy’s Catfish Row. During the 20 months following the receipt of the first scene on November 12, they worked on the opera, completing it in September of 1935.
The world premiere of Porgy and Bess, with some of its operatic characteristics intact, took place on September 30, 1935 at Boston’s Colonial Theater, and it opened in New York at the Alvin Theater on October 10, 1935, running for 124 performances until January 25, 1936, and then touring until March. Though it met with mixed reviews, the Gershwins never lost faith in their work which, however, they were forced to revise as a musical theater piece, the form in which it was known for most of the first fourty years of its theatrical life. While working with his brother Ira on some film scores in California, George wrote to Heyward on January 26, 1937: “How about planning another opera or operetta for the future? I am sure you could turn out a grand book and I am very anxious to start thinking about a serious musical.” Less than six months later, on July 11, 1937, he was dead at the age of 38, following emergency surgery for a brain tumor. Heyward died in 1940, and only Ira lived long enough to see the opera’s worldwide success.
Porgy and Bess was revived in 1938 in California, and a production from the early 1940s replaced much of the recitative with dialogue. The European premiere took place in Copenhagen on March 27, 1943, after which the Danish underground used recordings of “It Ain’t Necessarily So” to interrupt German propaganda broadcasts. The early 1950s saw extensive revivals throughout the U.S. and Europe, where it played at Milan’s La Scala, the Vienna Volksoper, Moscow and Leningrad, and London’s Stoll Theatre.
In June of 1976, Houston Grand Opera presented its first true, i.e. operatic, version of Porgy and Bess, directed by Jack O’Brien and conducted by John DeMain, at the Music Hall. The first company ever to present it as its composer intended, HGO’s 1976 production established the Gershwins’ masterpiece as a major work in the American operatic repertoire. Porgy and Bess became, in the words of Robert Kimball, “…as the opera was first envisioned…[It] has vindicated the faith of its creators and become one of the beloved works of the American imagination.” Subsequently presented on Broadway in association with Sherwin M. Goldman, the production won a Tony award for most Innovative Revival and was nominated for nine New York City Drama Desk Awards, continuing to tour to seventeen U.S. cities and six foreign countries. The original cast recording won a Grammy award for Best Operatic Recording as well as the coveted Grand Prix du Disque. Porgy and Bess was revived again in 1983 by Sherwin M. Goldman at Radio City Music Hall; by the Metropolitan Opera in 1985; and in 1986 at England’s prestigious Glyndebourne Festival. In 1987, HGO restaged the work, based on the 1976 production, to mark the 50th anniversary of George Gershwin’s death. [Porgy and Bess had its San Francisco Opera premiere in 1977 and was revived here in 1987 and 1995.]
George Gershwin was born on September 26, 1898, in Brooklyn, New York, the second son (Ira was two years older) of Morris and Rose Bruskin Gershwin. An accomplished pianist since childhood, he grew up near Harlem, hearing black musicians such as James P. Johnson, Eubie Blake, Charles Luckeyth “Lucky” Roberts, Thomas “Fats” Waller and Art Tatum. He first earned his livelihood as a “song plugger” (song demonstrator) for a music publisher and as an accompanist for vaudeville artists and rehearsal piantist for Broadway shows. He recorded over 125 piano rolls and wrote popular songs, making a reputation as a sought-after songwriter for the theater. In 1924 he formed a partnership with his brother Ira, and together they established American musical theater as a widely recognized form, writing material for Gertrude Lawrence, Fred and Adele Astaire, and Ethel Merman. Gershwin rejected the rigid division between serious and popular music, also composing symphonic scores such as Rhapsody in Blue, Concerto in F, An American in Paris, and Cuban Overture. George Gershwin died in Hollywood on July 11, 1937.
Ira Gershwin, the first songwriter to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, was born in New York City on December 6, 1896. in 1917, The Evening Sun published his first song lyrics (“You may throw all the rice you desire but please, friends, throw no shoes”). Four years later, he enjoyed his first major stage success, Two Little Girls in Blue, written with another Broadway newcomer, Vincent Youmans. In 1924, Ira and his brother George created the smash hit Lady, Be Good!, continuing their partnership through a dozen major stage scores and producing such standards as “Fascinating Rhythm,” “The Man I Love,” “‘S Wonderful,” “Embraceable You,” “I Got Rhythm,” “But Not for Me,” and others far too numerous to mention. During his long career, Ira also enjoyed productive collaborations with such composers as Harold Arlen, Vernon Duke, Kurt Weill, Burton Lane, and Jerome Kern, with whom he created his greatest song hit of any one year, “Long Ago and Far Away.” Ira Gershwin died on August 17, 1983, in Beverly Hills, California.
Edwin DuBose Heyward was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on August 31, 1885, into an old Charleston family (he was the great-great-grandson of Thomas Heyward, a signer of the Declaration of Independence). A well-known Southern poet, he was invited to work at the McDowell Colony in Peterboro, New Hampshire, where he met Dorothy Hartzell Khuns, another McDowell colonist whom he later married. With Dorothy’s encouragement, DuBose abandoned his business career and devoted himself to writing. His novel, Porgy, was the basis of a play which he wrote in collaboration with Dorothy, and which was produced by the Theater Guild. It formed the basis of the folk opera, Porgy and Bess. He later wrote a number of dramas and short stories, including Mamba’s Daughters, Half Pint Flask and Brass Ankle, all of which were set in the Carolina Low Country. He was also a movie scenarist who worked on film productions of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones and Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth. He died in North Carolina on June 16, 1940. Dorothy died in 1961, and was survived by Jennifer DuBose Heyward, their only child, under whose will was established the Dorothy and DuBose Heyward Memorial Fund, a foundation dedicated to the support of the performing arts.
Dorothy Heyward, née Dorothy Hartzell Khuns, met DuBose Heyward at the McDowell Colony for artists in New England. She was then a student at the Harvard Dramatic Workshop. They were married in 1923. In 1924, an important year in their lives, her first play won the Harvard Prize and was produced on Broadway, and he wrote his first novel, Porgy. Because she could not persuade her husband that his novel should be made into a play, Dorothy Heyward quietly wrote the first draft of the play alone; he believed that she was working on a detective story. When she read to him what she had written, he joined her in writing the final stage version. The play Porgy, after a long run in America, was produced in London by the late Sir Charles Cochran. Leter, the Heywards collaborated on a dramatization of DuBose’s novel, Mamba’s Daughters.
This article was published by San Francisco Opera in 1995.
- Approximate running time: 3 hours, 15 minutes including one intermission
- Sung in English with English supertitles
- Washington National Opera production
- This production is made possible, in part, by Company Sponsors John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn, and by the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trusts Philanthropic Fund.
- Production photo: Karin Cooper, courtesy of Washington National Opera
- Cast, program and schedule are subject to change
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