The first musical adaptation of Porgy and Bess premieres this week in London, featuring classic jazz songs like Summertime that helped save the Gershwin opera from the critics after it opened in 1935.
The story of Porgy and Bess unfolds during a steamy 1930s summer in a black slum in Charleston, South Carolina against a backdrop of murder, drugs, and prostitution.
Porgy, a cripple, falls in love with the ravishing Bess, who is married to an alcoholic who commits murder.
The four-hour opera has been attacked from all sides for decades, skewered as unclassifiable and too long as well as accused of spreading racist ideas at a time when America was mired in segregation.
Considered the first American opera, Porgy and Bess met with a cold reception at its premiere at the Alvin Theatre, New York on October 1935, being dropped from the box office after only 124 performances.
Subsequent efforts fared no better in the United States, but the opera enjoyed success with European audiences, in spite of a few jolts.
With white actors, the opera premiered in Europe in March 1943 in Copenhagen while it was under Nazi occupation. However, the Gestapo closed it down after just 22 performances in packed houses because it considered it subversive.
The opera suffered from too much of a divide between its elitist orchestration — 50 instruments to accompany tenors, baritones, and sopranos — and the popular style of the dialogue and songs.
However, it was the racial aspects that stirred unease about the opera. Harry Belafonte refused to play the role of Porgy in the 1959 film adaptation, which won several prizes, including an Oscar.
Sidney Poitier, who took the role, said later that he would have preferred to reject it. Several of the original actors worried later about stereotypes they feared they were spreading about African-Americans.
How has a work, based on the novel that Dubose and Dorothy Heyward wrote in 1926 around a crime, managed to survive for more than 70 years?
It’s a musical ”masterpiece,” said director and producer Trevor Nunn, who is behind the £3-million (€4,5-million, $5,7-million) musical adaptation of Porgy and Bess.
Apart from the lullaby Summertime, the spectator will be able to enjoy live classic songs like ”I got plenty o’nuttin”, ”It ain’t necessary” or ”I loves you, Porgy”.
The show, which has been cut down to two hours and 20 minutes, stages 40 actors accompanied by a 20-instrument orchestra.
”For several years, I have been working with the Gershwin family on a version of this masterpiece that could reach a wider audience,” Nunn explained.
”Extensively reworked and re-orchestrated as a two-hour-20-minute musical to draw more deeply on the story’s southern roots and injected with renewed verve and pace,” he said.
The musical opens Thursday at London’s Savoy theatre, and will play until March 31, but it could be extended, according to a spokesperson for the show. – Sapa-AFP