BWW Features: Atlanta Presents a New Staging of PORGY AND BESS

It's not unusual for music lovers to ponder what the Great American Opera is. A good portion will argue persuasively in favor of Stephen Sondheim's SWEENEY TODD. Others will present strong reasons for George Gershwin's PORGY AND BESS. It's quite possible that THE GHOSTS OF VERSAILLES by John Corigliano has its coterie of supporters, too.

There's no question about this matter in the mind of conductor Keith Lockhart, who will be leading a new production of the Gershwins'masterpiece in Atlanta: his hands-down choice is PORGY AND BESS. "I'm really enjoying spending time with this work again. The last time I spent any significant time with it was during the Gershwin Centennial year when I wasn't lucky enough to do a stage production but I did two concert versions of the piece. Now I'm coming back to it after thirteen years have gone by. I'm stopping my studying dead in its tracks to marvel at what a great piece it is. It really is! When you think about who George Gershwin was and the brevity of his classical composing career--which was a scant thirteen years--it's amazingly ambitious. It's a full grand opera in every sense of the word and it contains some truly fabulous theatrical writing. There's part of me that wants to argue in favor of SWEENEY TODD, but certainly in terms of American subject matter and integrating an American musical idiom into an opera, I can't think of anything that has come close to PORGY AND BESS."

The question of orchestrations was broached and although it isn't clear about whether George Gershwin did them for this piece, Lockhart is convinced he did. "There are lots of letters from Gershwin that go way back seven or eight years before he wrote this opera and the time when he was writing the "Concerto in F" and "An American in Paris" that indicate he did them. It's rather clear that he didn't write his own orchestration for "Rhapsody in Blue" but Gershwin was nothing if not a quick study. He had amazingly quick assimilation. In "An American in Paris" you can tell that he did his own orchestrations simply from the fact that there are issues that I think if he'd gone back to it after ten years or so, he would have done differently. As for this opera, my vote is ‘yes', I don't see any great evidence to the contrary. I think the orchestration is absolutely masterful. It's very Gershwin. It's not done by anybody else."

Oddly enough, though, when PORGY AND BESS received its first production, it was done as a  Broadway musical. Its recitatives were replaced with dialogue and it was performed at the Tremont Theatre in Boston and then moved onto Broadway for a not very successful run. "You have to understand that there were lots of issues that relegated it to a Broadway house," observes Lockhart. "Looking at the score, there's no doubt that it's an opera. It is far too musically written to be a book musical. At the time that it was written, it was unusual to have anything performed by almost an all-black cast. That alone would take it out of the realm of the Met. However, all of the plot-forwarding is done by recitative and a lot of the spoken dialogue is written in the score against music It's extremely free-form and changes tempo every couple of bars. This opposed to the recitative in Mozart's operas where basically there's a chord held and you say a lot of fast notes. This piece features recitatives closer to what's found in THE TALES OF HOFFMANN, where it's all in tempo but every tempo is in a different for different characters. All of that is reflected in Gershwin's music and it makes conducting it extremely difficult."

Speaking about the challenges this particular score presents to a conductor, Lockhart jokes and states, "Yeah. It's pretty hard. One of the funny things about doing it in a concert format, is that you basically present a two and a half hour version with cuts here and there. One thing I noticed when I came into this was feeling: ‘Oh yeah, I know PORGY AND BESS' and then I started looking at the places under the paperclips where we had cut things that are plot-forwarding and don't really work in a concert version. I began to realize that there were a hundred pages of music that are very dense and difficult. I also have to add that so much of this score is Gershwin's pastiche of musical languages. It's grand opera with very distinct jazz idioms in it. Just the notation and performance practice of jazz in the 1930's being integrated into an opera makes some translation necessary by the conductor." The score includes "Bess You Is My Woman Now," "Summertime," "I Loves You Porgy," and "It Ain't Necessarily So" among others.

The maestro continues, "Another challenge for the me is that all of the plot-forwarding is done by recitative and a lot of the spoken dialogue is written in the score against music It's extremely free-form and changes tempo every couple of bars. This opposed to the recitative in Mozart's operas where basically there's a chord held and you say a lot of fast notes. This piece features recitatives closer to what's found in THE TALES OF HOFFMANN, where it's all in tempo and there are different tempos for different characters. It's reflected in Gershwin's music and it makes conducting it extremely challenging."

Speaking from Atlanta, Lockhart has settled in for a month of rehearsals with cast and chorus in preparation for the February 26th opening of the Gershwin work, with six days of rehearsal each week. "We've got four performances," Lockhart comments. "It's an incredible amount of time spent together for the amount of time spent performing. It does give the artists a chance to get really into the material."

The cast of Atlanta's PORGY AND BESS includes Michael Redding, Laquita Mitchell, Eric Greene, Na Guanda Nobles, Chauncey Packer and Aundi Marie Moore. "I know some of the names of people in the cast but I don't think I've worked with any of them. I'm sure that someone will come up to me and say, "We did such and such together' It always happens," he adds with a laugh.

An innovative approach to the scenic design for this particular PORGY AND BESS is promising to be an aspect that will be quite unique: digital projections will be used as set designs. The rear projections used for this presentation will depict images of real locations in Charleston, South Carolina and the barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina. Actual hurricane footage from The Weather Channel will be used in the hurricane scene. Combining these images with a minimal amount of three-dimensional pieces of scenery will create a production that is sure to be talked about for some time. "Obviously scenic design is not my purview until we get into the theater and we begin tech rehearsals. That's when I'll have to put the music together with all that. I'm told it's spectacular with the projections and the levee effects. So many opera productions are going away from the ‘hammer and nails' scenic structure and going with things that are more like this these days because they can. It can be absolutely spectacular, it can be a lot cheaper and truckloads of material won't have to moved from one place to another. You can create a lot of magic in the hands of a skilled designer. I've heard that the designs for this are really amazing, though. I'm prepared to be wowed!"

Opera lovers will have opportunities to not only be wowed, but to decide for themselves whether the Gershwins' PORGY AND BESS is, indeed, the Great American Opera when the Atlanta Opera presents it  at the Cobb Energy Center. Performance dates are 2/26, 3/1, 3/4, and 3/6 (matinee). For tickets, go to www.atlantaopera.org, or call (404) 881-8885.

Photos by Tim Collins/UK Opera Theatre

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