Theatre

The soaring melodies of Gershwin’s ‘Porgy And Bess’ –‘Summertime’, ‘Bess, You Is My Woman Now’, and ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ – have entered our bloodstream. And yet the piece itself, hovering between opera and musical, is rarely performed over here. How strange then that it should come into the West End in a new version by Trevor Nunn, at the same time as ‘Caroline, Or Change’ (book and lyrics by Tony Kushner, music Jeanine Tesori) opens at the National Theatre. Feature continues

Written some 70 years apart, both pieces reflect the lives of Afro-Americans living in the southern states of America. One has been described as a ‘folk opera’ (‘Porgy’) and the other as a ‘people’s opera’ (‘Caroline’). A review by Frank Rich in The New York Times of the latter stated that ‘the music invokes some of the torrential quality of the hurricane-battered Charleston of “Porgy and Bess”.’ ‘Porgy’ was first staged in 1935, and its powerful story made a strong contrast with all the light escapism that was playing on Broadway to help people forget the Depression. ‘Caroline’ is very different too from the spate of happy musicals that have followed 9/11 on Broadway.

But attitudes to race have, of course, changed. The story of ‘Porgy’ was inspired by a newspaper cutting in 1924 which described how a poor, crippled man had been accused of shooting a woman. DuBose Heyward, a local man, used this for a book, and then with his wife, Dorothy, turned it into a play long before George and Ira Gershwin added songs and music. The Heywards had close connections with the isolated Gullah community in Charleston where the piece is set. But the Gershwins were second-generation immigrant Jews, who grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Nevertheless, they did their research, and spent a summer at Folly Beach observing the Gullah community before creating Catfish Row on-stage, where the poor black families scrape a living as stevedores and fishermen.

The first run of ‘Porgy’ on Broadway only lasted for 124 performances. It was criticised on all sides for a variety of reasons from the stereotyping of the black characters, to the hybrid score. Clarke Peters, who is playing Porgy in this new production, has visited Charleston and he defends the piece against many of its accusers, some of which he puts down to the arrogance of the north. ‘America is a vast country and I don’t think the differences in the disparate African cultures that settled around the southern parts of the states were accounted for. It’s actually a fairly good study of the Gullah culture. But if you are a sophisticated New Yorker, you don’t want to hear people using “dems” and “das”.’

‘Porgy’ plays powerfully on the heart. It’s no surprise, given the involvement of the politically astute Tony Kushner, that ‘Caroline, or Change’, a semi-autobiographical story, is a thousand times more complex thematically than ‘Porgy’ could ever be. Bess is a character driven by basic instincts. Caroline is a complicated, frustrated woman, a black maid who is working for a Jewish family in Louisiana in 1963 at the time of Kennedy’s assassination and the burgeoning civil rights movement. The world is changing and so are the lives of Caroline and the young boy of the household. He looks to her for comfort, but there is no sentimentality here and she refuses to play the role of surrogate mother.

‘Caroline’ was originally commissioned by the San Francisco Opera but that fell through. In any case, its director George C Wolfe (who is also directing the production at the National) wanted to use actors from a musical theatre background who would be more equipped to deal with the nuances that the material required. Wolfe is sure, however, that it will play in opera houses in the future. Like ‘Porgy’, it draws on a variety of musical traditions: the popular music of the time; ancient sounds from the black south; classical music; and klezmer rhythms. ‘There’s this wonderful blurring of boundaries,’ says Wolfe, ‘which I think is so interesting in any piece about America because there is no purity of reality. As separatist as America can sometimes be, the music has always achieved a kind of democracy.’

‘Porgy’ is now rightly considered a classic, but Wolfe still has problems with the piece. ‘It’s a genius score. But it’s a very complicated work for me. I’ve been asked to direct it a bunch of times, and I’ve told the people that it would be opening night and I still would not have staged “I got plenty o’nuttin”. I’m politically, culturally, and spiritually incapable of staging that number. But it’s really interesting and exciting that both the pieces are happening in London at the exact same time.’

‘Caroline, or Change’ is previewing at the National Theatre. ‘Porgy and Bess’ previews from Wed (25) at the Savoy Theatre.