The Gershwins’ ® Porgy And Bess, Colosseum 11th July 2012

Porgy & Bess

George Gershwin, DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin

London Stage Premiere of Cape Town Opera’s production

Performed by Cape Town Opera

Presented by Askonas Holt and Raymond Gubbay

Porgy: Xolel Sixaba

Bess: Tsakane Velentine Masawangayi

Crown: Mandisinde Mbuyazwe

Sportin’Life: Victor Ryan Robertson

 


Where to start…..

Mum introduced me to Porgy & Bess in the early 1960s – she brought it home to play on our fabulous record-player. I was smitten from the beginning. Looking back I am unsure if she then understood the shocking nature of this story of a black prostitute and her crippled lover. If she did she never let on. That was over fifty years back. Since then I’ve seen Porgy in Broadway and in the Royal Opera House.

Porgy & Bess is sometimes regarded as that odd half-way house between Opera and Musical that isn’t operetta. Personally I don’t think that is quite fair. Ira  & George Gershwins’ Porgy & Bess is something different to both but probably, no certainly, more properly belongs to the tradition of opera. It is also true that many Opera lovers might disparage it as a musical and it is equally the case that many lovers of Musical find its sung-through nature and disturbing subject matter too serious for their tastes. But the problems with Porgy & Bess don’t arise from the elitist view of one performance art over another so much as the musical language employed by Gershwin which furnishes both sublime moments of musical revelation and equally sometimes inhibit and limits vocal characterisation. When it isn’t well realised it can turn into a series of tableau for its cornucopia of wonderful songs.

It deserves its place in repertoire – the inspired music that opens – Summertime – alone justifies performing Porgy & Bess and as everyone knows there are many more memorable gems of purest ray serene locked in the deep of its extraordinary score. These are often more than musical numbers or songs; they’re more ariosa into arias. Created to celebrate Cape Town Opera’s 10th anniversary in 2009, this vibrantly physical production brilliantly highlights the work’s universal and enduring message by shifting the action to apartheid-era Soweto. This works well and most movingly. but then the cast spend a lot of their time trying to inhabit faux southern accents sometimes I felt at the epxnese of purely expressing the music. Ella Fitzgerald sings Summertime here – fabulous phrasing as ever… and here Leontyne Price\’s sing Summertime in her prime in Munich in 1968…pure gold…

The set evoked this tormented closed world of Apartheid which of course eerily echoes the Segregation practiced in the southern states of America. And the Jewish immigrant Gershwin brothers themselves knew a little bit about racial hatreds and prejudice which had carried their family into New York.

The music often seethes with the infusion of jazz and rebellion that gradually brought the injustices heaped upon Black  America into the foreground of white conscience. That journey reached a watershed in the Civil Rights movement but its moment was yet to come when Porgy & Bess was written. And that with the underlying subject matter of the story reveals the truly shocking, bold and revolutionary nature of Gershwins’ composition. And therefore now that this seems hardly shocking at all to us – a story set in the dark poverty of the black underclass living out their lives in a desperate economic slavery – merely tells how far we have travelled. It does not tell us yet how far we have to go.

This production fizzes with authenticity when the cast sings together at the funerals of the many who will litter the stage before the night is done; at the picnic;in the storm scene and at the close with Porgy. These scenes really evoke that sense of community and loyalty that povery and oppression manufacture in the human heart. And the cast sing in these with powerful sense of commitment to the music that one cannot help but be moved. Robbins death and the funerary preparations are beautifully realised.

It’s also true that there is a sense of jostling over-crowded busyness that evokes the world of the shanty town almost anywhere anytime. This well caught but I found some of its expression stagy – buckets of water carried on the head with no water; washing with no water; floor scrubbing with no water. a strawberry-seller selling plastic strawberries – apparently singly; a crab seller with a basket of plastic crabs; there were scenes where there were scrubbing floors or sweeping floors – all manner of back-business – so much that I began to find it wearying and distracting.

At the heart of this story there is Porgy a cripple and Bess a drug-using good-time girl coming to the end of her good-times. Their unlikely fusion is the heart of the music and in the various scenes they have together the music they share is wonderful leading to their hymn of love  – Bess you is my woman now – but although I wanted to feel the anguished chemistry between them this Porgy and Bess seemed to me to inhabit different worlds – let alone share the squalid rooms on the corner of Catfish Row where mutually they discover the redemptive power of love’s healing balm.

That brings us to Bess’s dealer – the devil incarnate –  Sporting Life, the role Sammy Davis Junior made so much his own – bathed doubtless in the light of the fast-lane-life he was living in the Las Vegas of the Rat Pack. I wanted him to be a big success – after like the devil he has two of the best tunes – it ain’t necessarily so & there’s a boat that’s leaving soon for New York. Sadly Victor Ryan Roberstson’s voice lacked the punch and his performance the panache. This was a truly one trick one dimensional devil….

Generally the singing of the principles was somewhat uneven. Porgy was amazing – a wonderful, deep bass rich and full but Bess was under-powered and some of the acting a little stilted. The others gave us something but their interactions lacked conviction.

I was sitting nearby the former culture secretary David Mellor and his wife whom I believe were reviewing for the Sunday Mail. He seemed taken with the production and shouted bravo at the end. The audience seem well enough pleased and I’m only a judge of my own opinions. But though I’d say go and see it because when its good its electrifying sadly for me its good parts aren’t really enough to make a whole.

The orchestra I thought loud and didn’t always bring out the other subtlies in the score behind the jazz rhythm with it shades of blues.

/Try catching that boat to New York here….Damon Evans sing and lives Sporting Life is this clip

 

 

 


 

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