Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (37 page)

Although much of the dialogue was retained in the scenes that remained, some of the subtext regrettably did not manage to escape the cutting floor. For example, in the 1934 libretto, when Reno arrives unannounced in Evelyn Oakleigh’s stateroom in order to frame him for a phony seduction, Evelyn, expecting the steward and without turning around,
asks the visitor to “just put it down on the bed,” expresses his hope that “it’s good and hot,” and states his desire that whatever the visitor has to offer he wants to receive before he is dressed. In response to this proposition, Reno asks whether she is early or late. In the screenplay, the tea is replaced by a dozen martini cocktails, presumably not hot, and when Reno arrives unseen Evelyn simply asks his visitor to leave the drinks there to which Reno simply responds, “I beg your pardon.” The somewhat suggestive “not a grope” becomes “not a try” when Reno complains to Billy that he shouldn’t have led her on by
not
getting her drunk,
not
asking her to his apartment to see his etchings, and
not
making a move on her in a taxi. “Hell” and other fiendish words, including “hot pants,” may be banished, but Reno’s basic complaint to Billy onstage, “You never even laid a hand on me, and I’m not used to men treating me like that!,” was repeatable in the film. Similarly, although the details remain unspecified, Reno is allowed to confirm that Evelyn does “things” to her. One line that has, if anything, increased its topicality and resonance in the early twenty-first century is Moon’s claim that he left the con artist game when the mortgage companies arrived.
¹³

Although it often offers tangential connections with the 1934 stage version of
Anything Goes
, this film should be put back in circulation without delay where it can be criticized and enjoyed on its own terms.

As we have seen (see
chapter 4
), Rouben Mamoulian, with Gershwin’s acquiescence, if not approval, managed to cut about forty minutes before
Porgy and Bess
launched its career on Broadway in 1935. Despite the cuts, what audiences heard at its Broadway debut was a full-scale opera, with sparse amounts of spoken dialogue reserved mainly for white characters. A few years later, the Cheryl Crawford Broadway revival of 1942 turned the opera into a more conventional musical with many cuts and spoken dialogue replacing much of Gershwin’s recitative. Ten years after that, the Blevins Davis and Robert Breen production starring Leontyne Price as Bess, William Warfield as Porgy, and Cab Calloway as Sporting Life brought the opera closer to its operatic roots, style, and length. The historic Houston Grand Opera production of 1976 completed this process. In fact, Houston returned the work to what it looked like during the tryouts prior to its Broadway opening, that is, an uncut
Porgy and Bess
that included the forty soon-to-be-discarded minutes.

Porgy and Bess
, 1959 film. Porgy (Sidney Poitier) and Bess (Dorothy Dandridge) inside Porgy’s room.

Porgy and Bess
, 1959 film. Porgy (Poitier) and Bess (Dandridge) outside Porgy’s door, with goat.

Between the Davis-Breen and the Houston production lies the shadow of the first film version of
Porgy and Bess
, produced by Samuel Goldwyn (his eightieth and final picture), and after its first director Mamoulian was fired, directed by Otto Preminger. Playing but not singing the part of Porgy was Sidney Poitier, at the time still in the early stages of his career as America’s leading black actor and box office draw. Dorothy Dandridge, a rising star who had played the title role in Preminger’s
Carmen Jones
a few years earlier, was cast as Bess. The film marked a return to the type of presentation not seen since Crawford’s production, a shorter version in which the dialogue is mostly spoken rather than sung and with less activity from the chorus. Some critics lauded the film, including Bosley Crowther of the
New York Times
. Others were highly critical, especially of the sets, which seemed too theatrical and unrealistic. In “Why Negroes Don’t Like ‘Porgy and Bess,’” Era Bell Thompson, writing for the African-American magazine
Ebony
faulted the film for its anachronistic continuities with the opera.
¹⁴
Both works, this reviewer felt, reinforced stereotypes. For Bell, the Goldwyn-Preminger extravaganza was merely “the same old catfish.” This is a topic to which we must return.

The film was a triumph of love over money. Goldwyn had seen the opera in 1935 and wanted to bring it to the screen practically ever since, and he spared no effort to attract the finest African-American stars of the day. When the warehouse containing the sets was destroyed on the eve of production, he built new sets from scratch. In the end the film lost half of its $7 million investment and received only one of the three Academy Awards for which it was nominated, a Best Scoring award shared between André Previn and Ken Darby. When it was first released, Ira Gershwin was quoted as saying, “It is everything we hoped for.”
¹⁵
Other early supporters of the film included Dorothy Heyward, who exclaimed that “the film exceeds our highest expectations.”
¹⁶
George Gershwin’s great friend Kay Swift was enthusiastic about the film and agreed to give lectures and interviews on its behalf in twelve cities over a period of fifteen weeks.
¹⁷
The film was broadcast on national television in 1967 and then withdrawn, along with the soundtrack, at the insistence of the Gershwin estate owners Ira and Leonore Gershwin in 1974, two years before the work returned to its operatic roots with the Houston Opera production. Sometime between 1959 and 1974, Ira and Leonore, or at least Ira, experienced a change of heart about the work.

Since neither Poitier nor Dandridge was a singer, their songs were dubbed. Goldwyn attempted to complement their speaking voices musically and to use African-American opera singers whenever possible for all the major roles.
The voice of Porgy was Robert McFerrin. Although today less well known than his son Bobby McFerrin, in his own time the senior McFerrin had an impressive and distinguished career. Among other achievements, he became the first black male to sing at the Metropolitan Opera—in January 1955, the same month that the first African-American female to perform there, Marian Anderson, made her debut. The following year McFerrin sang the title role, in Verdi’s
Rigoletto
, at the Met. The voice of Bess was Adele Addison, a versatile singer of opera and concert literature, perhaps best known today for her recordings of Baroque literature. Leontyne Price, the much-acclaimed Bess of the Breen-Davis stage Bess, was invited but declined to dub the role for Dandridge. In any event, Addison, whose operatic roles included Gilda and Micaela (Price was noted for her Aïda onstage and Carmen on recordings), possessed a lighter lyric soprano sound than Price and thus matched Dandridge’s speaking voice more closely.

Sammy Davis Jr., Sporting Life, widely praised for his “new sinister spin to the character (thus establishing a precedent for later interpretations),” did his own singing for the film.
¹⁸
Since contractual agreements precluded the use of his voice on Columbia records, however, Cab Calloway, the Breen-Davis Sporting Life, is the voice heard on the album soundtrack. Brock Peters (Crown), who played the falsely accused rapist in the film adaptation of
To Kill a Mockingbird
(1962) and sang the lead role in the Broadway revival and the screen version of
Lost in the Stars
in the 1970s, sang for himself in the
Porgy and Bess
film. The Maria was Pearl Bailey, the role created both in the 1927 play and the opera by the non-singing precocious rapper Georgette Harvey. Unlike Harvey, Bailey, a leading popular singer and one of the stars of
St. Louis Woman
on Broadway in the 1940s, was featured as a soloist to augment what was a choral number onstage, “I Can’t Sit Down.” One year earlier, in the film adaptation of
South Pacific
, Juanita Hall, acclaimed on Broadway for her creation of Bloody Mary, had suffered the indignity of being replaced on the soundtrack. Diahann Carroll as Clara, the mother who sings “Summertime,” did not sing Clara onstage, but she was nonetheless an able singer who before long would record an album of
Porgy and Bess
songs and even starred in a Tony Award–winning performance of Richard Rodgers’s
No Strings
; even so, she was similarly replaced on the
Porgy
soundtrack. Peters, Bailey, and Carroll, along with Dandridge were all alumni of Otto Preminger’s 1954 film
Carmen Jones
, the film adaptation of Hammerstein’s 1940s Broadway hit reinterpretation of Bizet’s opera
Carmen
.

Sammy Davis Jr. eagerly campaigned for the role of Sporting Life but others, most prominently Harry Belafonte, who had played Joe (Don José) in Preminger’s
Carmen Jones
, turned down offers to appear in Goldwyn’s
Porgy and Bess
. Whether as a result of manipulation by his agent or Goldwyn, threats to his career, or a combination of these, the initially reluctant
Poitier eventually capitulated. This is what he said at a news conference held on December 10, 1957, six months before shooting was scheduled to begin:

I have never, to my conscious knowledge, done anything that I thought would be injurious to anyone—particularly to my own people. Now this is a personal choice. I do not pretend to be the conscience of all Negroes…. I was convinced irrevocably that it will be a great motion picture and tremendous entertainment and that it will be enjoyed by everyone—little and big—people of all races and creeds.
¹⁹

Poitier even went as far as asserting that Goldwyn and Mamoulian were “almost as sensitive” as he was to the dangers of portraying racial stereotypes in popular culture.

The film inevitably shared some of the stereotypes that characterize the opera. The characters are uneducated; Sporting Life is a pimp, drug dealer, and an atheist; and Bess is a former prostitute and drug addict, but nonetheless a relatively sedate progenitor of Mimi in Jonathan Larson’s
Rent
.
²⁰
Crown is a murderer. Sporting Life’s evil qualities may have been magnified in the film, but Dandridge’s Bess was accused of being too elegant and gentle. In response to the Production Code, if not the demands of the story, Porgy seems to be sleeping on the floor and not directly adjacent to his own bed, which is occupied by Bess. Missing from the film are not only the “Buzzard Song” but other remnants of Porgy’s superstitions. Serena refuses Bess’s money for the burial of her husband Robbins, who was murdered in a drunken rage by Bess’s Crown; she later accuses Bess of being unfit to mother Clara’s baby. The film introduces a genuine Christian preacher on Kittiwah Island as a foil for Sporting Life’s blasphemous “It Ain’t Necessarily So” (followed by an exuberant, almost orgiastic dance that was not in the opera, in a jazz arrangement more 1950s than 1930s in style). These added touches clarify that Christian values are preferred to those of Sporting Life and his followers. The crooked lawyer Frazier is entirely absent, as is Archdale, the benevolent white man whose parents were slave owners who once owned the parents of Peter, the Honey Man. The film also greatly reduced the amount of dialect heard in both the spoken dialogue and the songs themselves. In short,
Porgy and Bess
may be rightly interpreted as full of arguably demeaning stereotypes, but the film version was demonstrably far less so. Nevertheless, after its initial release and nationally televised broadcast in 1967, the Gershwin estate chose to suppress this historic cinematic version of Gershwin’s masterpiece.

Ostensibly, the film was not withdrawn for its controversial depictions of African Americans but for artistic reasons. It was withdrawn, they said in effect, because the surviving Gershwins did not want a Broadway version of
Porgy and Bess
to represent George and Ira’s opera in a film. Michael Strunsky, the nephew of Ira and his wife Leonore and their executor after the latter’s death in 1991, summarized Leonore’s strong position on the subject: “My aunt didn’t want it distributed. She and my uncle felt it was a Hollywoodization of the piece. We now acquire any prints we find and destroy them.”
²¹
It is also clear that Ira’s wife Leonore, who lived to see
Porgy and Bess
produced on the prestigious stages of the Metropolitan and Glyndebourne, did not want a filmed stage version to represent the work and for this reason did not even approve a filmed operatic
Porgy and Bess
until nearly a decade after Ira’s death in 1983. This was the television studio production directed by Trevor Nunn (not a videotaped live performance in front of an audience) that eventually appeared in 1993 and will be discussed shortly, nearly sixty years after the opera’s Broadway debut.