Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber

by Block, Geoffrey

  Ostensibly, the film was not withdrawn for its controversial depictions of African Americans but for artistic reasons. It was withdrawn, they said in effect, because the surviving Gershwins did not want a Broadway version of Porgy and Bess to represent George and Ira’s opera in a film.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.

  Certainly, the Goldwyn-Preminger film poorly represents the work when compared with the operatic form intended by Gershwin. This may be reason alone for lovers of the opera to avoid the film. But the change of approach from an operatic to a more conventional Broadway musical conception of the work does not result in a film that is disrespectful of the work or a failure on its own Broadway-Hollywood terms. Much of the recitative and large stretches of the choral numbers have vanished, and Robbins and Crown fight in silence. But nearly all of the many songs are present and often complete. If one can believe the timings offered by A. Scott Berg or Howard Pollack, the film actually runs longer than the version Broadway audiences saw in 1935 (after the 40 minutes of cuts).22 It might be constructive to compare the Preminger Porgy and Bess with the Franco Zeffirelli Otello (1986), which reduced Verdi’s opera to 123 minutes (including long stretches of elaborate montages with neither music nor dialogue). Marcia Citron offers a list of what is absent from this adaptation, including the seemingly indispensable “Willow Song.”23 Compared to Zeffirelli, Preminger is a purist.

  Preminger’s accomplishment was to reveal the opera’s vital Broadway roots, and to reveal them in an idiomatic cinematic form. One fascinating byproduct of the non-operatic approach becomes evident in the decisions of what besides the songs needed to be sung. Although Gershwin offers many degrees and varieties of nuance in his recitatives, Preminger’s decision to replace most of the recitatives with spoken dialogues allows the ones that remain to become increasingly meaningful, especially since most of these are given to central characters at strategic moments in the work. One telling example is the expressive passage that begins with “They pass by singin,’” in which Porgy incorporates his own signature theme as well as his loneliness to explain why he is resigned to life without a woman. Another occurs a little later in the opening scene during Porgy’s musical foreshadowing of “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” as he rolls the dice. Still another place where impassioned recitative takes over speech occurs during Bess’s confrontation with Crown on Kittiwah Island in act II, scene 2 (“It’s like dis, Crown”). As the film progresses, the use of recitative at other lyrical musical moments when dialogue can no longer suffice creates an aura around these moments that is less evident when everything is sung. One might miss the addition of Serena and Maria that converts Porgy’s great third act aria, “Oh, Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess,” into a magnificent operatic trio in the stage version, but the direct, uncluttered, and obsessive quality of his solo plea in the film has an effect that is admittedly slightly reduced in an ensemble.

  The filming was interrupted by a devastating fire that destroyed two million dollars worth of sets and costumes and nearly brought production to a permanent halt. One of the casualties of the fire was Mamoulian as director, who was fired after he continued to insist on using actual settings in Charleston, South Carolina, and expressed other ideas that were at odds with Goldwyn’s vision of the film. In the end, only the Kittiwah scene was filmed on location. His employment terminated, Mamoulian was nonetheless paid in full for his work, which did stop him from taking legal action. Mamoulian’s firing marked the end of a brilliant career that included his direction of Love Me Tonight, Golden Boy, Oklahoma!, and Carousel as well as both the play and opera based on the story of Porgy and Bess.

  Although allegedly none of the surviving footage was shot by Mamoulian, one fascinating likely remnant occurs in the part of the film that corresponds to the final scene of the opera (the part of the scene that occurs prior to Porgy’s return from prison where he was jailed for a week because of his refusal to look directly at Crown’s dead body). The published vocal score contains most of the material that was cut during the tryouts, an unusual situation that has greatly contributed to the resistance by music directors to cuts in the opera. One part missing from this score, a rhythmic sequence added by Mamoulian, opened the final scene onstage in 1935. A description of the sequence appears in a production script now housed in the New York Public Library. The concert performance under conductor John Mauceri that was performed by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra in 2006 not only followed Gershwin’s cuts but restored this sequence. The 1959 film offers something similar at the beginning of the scene before the chorus enters with “How are you dis mornin’”?24

  The film, long unavailable in theaters or on video, made a rare guest appearance in 1998, on the occasion of a Gershwin Centennial Festival sponsored by the Institute of Studies in American Music in Gershwin’s beloved New York City. At this screening, Foster Hirsch, a professor of film studies at Brooklyn College, where the film was shown, offered appreciative reflections on the film. His thoughtful appraisal implicitly contradicts the attitudes of Leonore Gershwin that continue to be enforced by the Gershwin estate:

  Preminger’s direction is intensely cinematic, his approach far more sophisticated than that of a filmed play. Replacing passages of recitative with dialogue, he has made no attempt to present the material as an opera…. With his august presence and speaking voice, Poitier is a remote, dignified Porgy, a survivor. In effective contrast, Dandridge is an anguished Bess victimized by her beauty as well as her race and gender. Quite contrary to its tarnished reputation, Preminger’s film is a magisterial pageant, a ceremonial work deeply respectful both to the intentions of Gershwin and his collaborators and to its black subjects…. This “forbidden” text demands to be shown exactly as it is here, on a large screen and with a sound system that can do justice to what may well be the most glorious theatrical work by an American composer.25

  The overview in this chapter seconds Hirsch’s opinion. Despite its flaws, Goldwyn’s Porgy and Bess should not be sequestered in the Library of Congress. It deserves to be seen and heard.

  EMI Classics, 1993

  The first version of Porgy and Bess (1959) marked a return to the approach popularized in the Crawford revival in the early 1940s. The 1970s introduced the first recorded uncut Porgy and Bess, and the 1980s brought the uncut opera to the stages of the Metropolitan and Glyndebourne. But it was not until 1993 that this increasingly preferred version of the work reached the screen. This film, videotaped in a television studio, was based on the 1986 Glyndebourne production staged by Trevor Nunn, known to the world of Broadway through his direction of Cats and most recently Sunset Boulevard.

  By filming in a studio, Nunn was able to visually expand the world of Catfish Row, especially by taking advantage of a television studio’s ability to depict realistic waterways and other humanly constructed natural surroundings. In an unusual move, the cast—with few exceptions the same as that of the 1986 stage production—lip-synched to their own voices in the acclaimed 1989 London Philharmonic recording conducted by Simon Rattle. Four singers, most importantly Bruce Hubbard (Jake) who had died, were replaced by new actors.

  Porgy and Bess, 1993 film. Porgy (Willard White) casting away his crutches.

  Porgy and Bess
, 1993 film. Porgy (White) begins his long journey to New York City.

  For the most part, the television film, unlike its 1959 predecessor readily available on DVD, for the first time offered the complete opera as seen and heard onstage a few years earlier. All that is missing is the “Buzzard Song” in act II, scene 1, one of the cuts made shortly before the Broadway debut, and the opening of the final scene, act III, scene 3, which shows the citizens of Catfish Row waking up just prior to Porgy’s return from his week in jail for refusing to look at Crown’s dead body (ironically a scene partly visible in the otherwise heavily cut version of this scene in the Preminger film).26 It is not clear whether the stage version also cut these opening moments of act III, scene 3, but the 1989 recording and probably the Glyndebourne staging did contain the “Buzzard Song.” Surely its deletion cannot be attributed to its length or the possible strains it might place on a dubbed singing voice. The absence of the “Buzzard Song” and perhaps the opening of the final scene explains why the 1993 DVD clocks in at five minutes less than the 189 minutes of the 1989 recording, which provided the soundtrack for both.

  In addition to the film’s nearly complete performance state, some of its length can be attributed to tempos slower than those of recordings made between 1935 and 1942. The faster tempos of these older recordings hold to the historical performance movement truism that older is faster, a belief that is belied by the Avalon quartet’s leisurely film rendition of Porter’s “There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair” (see the discussion of the 1936 film Anything Goes). At the outset of the opera, Harolyn Blackwell’s performance of “Summertime” runs two minutes and forty seconds; this is nearly a minute longer than it took the original Clara, Abbie Mitchell, to sing the song at a rehearsal performance recorded on July 19, 1935. The first commercially recorded Clara, Helen Jepson, one year later clocked in at six seconds slower than Mitchell, and when the first Bess, Anne Brown, recorded the song in 1942, her time was ten seconds longer than Mitchell.27 Like “Ol’ Man River” before it, this particular song had by then become the signature moment of the entire work, and slowing it down gives it more dramatic weight, if not always more interest.

  A central decision in Nunn’s stage and film versions was to raise Porgy off his knees and take away his goat and his goat cart. Although Nunn’s Porgy is deformed and limps around on crutches, his standing posture presents a new view of the character, symbolically and literally raising his stature. At the end of the opera Porgy even throws down the crutches as he begins his slow and painful journey (on foot rather than by goat cart) to retrieve Bess in New York City. The removal of the goat necessitated a few line changes (e.g., in the final scene the coroner refers to Porgy as the beggar man instead of the goat man), but the effect is largely a visual and psychological one. Other dramatically significant visual revisions include Bess’s unmistakable flirtation with Robbins, which provides a motivation for Crown to murder him in the first scene that goes beyond a simple argument over a crap shoot as well as the decision to show Crown hobbling on to Kittiwah Island at the end of the first act, two scenes before he prohibits Bess from leaving the island to return to her Porgy. At the end of act II, scene 2, Nunn shows Jake’s boat leaving to meet its fate in the storm and a close-up of Maria’s anguished face. In act II, scene 4, he illustrates Crown’s attempted rescue and Clara’s death, neither of which are seen when the opera is staged. Finally, before we hear the music of act III, scene 1, we see Sporting Life lurking around, and later in the scene Nunn makes it clear that Sporting Life is complicit in Crown’s murder, a brutal murder by strangling that Sporting Life observes and tacitly encourages. In the 1935 stage directions, Porgy uses a knife (there are also no witnesses). In the 1959 film version, both methods of murder are combined.

  For those unable to see the opera Porgy and Bess in their neighborhood, the Nunn film provides an innovatively filmed and well-sung opportunity to see and hear what the work has become to most audiences and recording aficionados since the late 1970s. It is a most welcome addition to the short list of filmed adaptations of Broadway classics before Oklahoma!

  Pal Joey (1957)

  By the time a Hollywood studio got around to making a film version of Pal Joey in 1957, the show had completed both its first run, begun in 1940, and its 1952 Broadway revival. The Rodgers and Hart era was long past, and the Rodgers and Hammerstein era was nearing its own finale with Flower Drum Song and The Sound of Music. However, film versions of Oklahoma!, Carousel, and The King and I had appeared within the past two years, the film version of South Pacific was only one year away, and it must have looked like a good time to mine the riches of Rodgers’s past achievements with his first lyricist.

  The film adaptation of Pal Joey provided vivid proof that the makers of Broadway musicals could do more, show more, and say more onstage in the early 1940s than it was possible to do, show, and say on film in the late 1950s. Portraying behavior such as adultery was possible, but the Hollywood Production Code, which had expurgated Porter’s lyrics two decades earlier, had by now determined that a character engaging in such objectionable behavior would have to pay a clear price for such conduct. A musical based on two sleazy characters, Joey Evans and Vera Simpson, who use one another for sexual and financial gain, would not be permitted in a major motion picture in the United States for yet another decade—until the Code was finally cast off in the turbulent 1960s. It is also possible that the censorship was seconded by the projected onscreen Joey, Frank Sinatra, who may have recoiled from playing such a fundamentally foul character for fear of tarnishing his maturing public image, which was of concern to the broader Italian-American ethnic community as well. In the current era of media multiple choice, it may be hard to fathom the contradictory strictures in a social world with only one source of prestigious public audiovisual entertainment (Hollywood), and only three fledgling television networks still broadcasting only in black and white (CBS, NBC, and the upstart ABC).

  Pal Joey, 1957 film. Joey Evans (Frank Sinatra) and Vera Simpson (Rita Hayworth) take the gloves off.

  In any event, Vera, the flagrant adulteress in the stage version, is now a rich widower, and Joey, the heartless philanderer, at the end of the film marries the innocent Linda English instead of walking offstage to catch a fresh “mouse.” Linda, now a show girl infatuated with Joey instead of a stenographer he happens to meet in front of a pet shop, agrees to do a strip number, but in the end the uncharacteristically gallant Joey does not let her go through with it and does not take advantage of her sexually off-camera. Making Vera a former stripper sets up an opportunity to have her sing “Zip” to raise money for a charity. Onstage the song was delivered by the newspaper reporter Melba, who uses the song to describe her interview with the famous Gypsy Rose Lee, in which the surprisingly intellectual stripper shared her musings (including her considered opinion that the philosopher Schopenhauer was right) while zipping off her clothes. The seedy world of blackmailers, strippers, and other low-life characters is now replaced by likable show people and a likable ex-stripper socialite.

  Placing Frank Sinatra in the title role removed the dancing component associated with the role first played by Gene Kelly and in the revival by Harold Lang. The non-singing and for the most part non-dancing Kim Novak played Linda English. Novak, then at the peak of her popularity—one year before she starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo—and a major money earner for Columbia pictures, gained additional national exposure when she appeared on the July 29 cover of Time magazine shortly before the release of Pal Joey in September. Perhaps due to the star power of Sinatra and Novak, the film earned nearly five million dollars, one of the ten highest grossing films of the year.

  Appealing to a slightly older film audience, the role of Vera Simpson was played by one of the most popular World War II pinups and the major Columbia pictures star of the 1940s, Rita Hayworth. Hayworth herself had been featured on both Time and Life covers in 1941, the latter in one of the most famous photographs of the era (her image even ap
peared on an atomic nuclear bomb dropped on Bikini Atoll shortly after World War II). In 1957, she was a mature but still beautiful woman at thirty-nine and appropriate in her new role as the older woman. “Zip” gave Hayworth the opportunity to sing a suggestive but refined strip number without taking off more than her gloves. Its referential gesture to her similar glove-strip in Gilda would be familiar to anyone who had seen both films.28 Unfortunately, Hayworth, the first of an exclusive group to have partnered with both Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, only dances a little with Sinatra here.