EVEN AS GERSHWIN TOOK PART in coaching the Porgy and Bess players, all of whom had been chosen through auditions in which he had the final say, he stood ready to learn from their ideas. The opera’s choral director, Eva Jessye, recalled how she and her chorus came to join the cast:
My choir had just been barnstorming all through South Carolina, and for not very much money—we were barely making the train fare from town to town—and we’d come back to New York, where I was doing a radio program on South Carolina life. . . . I saw this notice in Film Daily looking for a black choir, and so we all went up and we auditioned. People from the Theatre Guild were there, I remember. We did the shout “Plenty Good Room,” and danced all over the stage.
George Gershwin jumped up and shouted: “That’s it! That’s what I want.” Gershwin, she added, “let us do what we knew how to do.”1
Anne Wiggins Brown, who originated the role of Bess, recalled that Gershwin “never objected to changes in his music.” She was in a position to know, having been directly involved in the opera’s creation:
He used me as a guinea pig and he tried everything and he would ask me, “Is this too high for a baritone?” “No, no, not if he doesn’t stay up there too long,” I would say. “How’s this, should I change this note?” “No, no. As a matter of fact, I’d like to do it higher,” would be my answer. I even made a few changes in “I Loves You Porgy,” notes which fit my voice better and he would say, “That’s good, let’s use that.”2
Brown was a twenty-one-year-old student at Juilliard when she read in a newspaper that Gershwin was interviewing singers for his opera. She wrote him a letter and two days later received a phone call inviting her to sing for him. Before the audition, she had the foresight to learn some facts about Gershwin.
I found myself standing in the foyer of his apartment, bending over to look under the coat rack for a place to put my boots. “What are you looking for?” he asked politely. And then one of those crazy ideas popped into my head. I said without thinking, “Your roller skates!” George Gershwin was quiet for a few moments and then he laughed. He threw back his head and roared. “How did you know about my roller skates?” he said, still laughing. “Well, I read, you know.”3
Expecting the session to last about half an hour that day, she ended up staying for almost two, singing art songs in French, German, and Russian and a spiritual, “A City Called Heaven.” Then Gershwin played as much of the opera as he had composed, singing all the parts. When he asked her to sing “Summertime,” “it just rolled out of my throat.”4
In the weeks that followed, Brown auditioned for the directors of the Theatre Guild and again for Ira and Rose Gershwin. One day Gershwin called to say, “Annie, I’ve just finished music for Clara. I want you to come and sing it for me.”5 Sometimes other singers joined Brown in Gershwin’s apartment, but more often it was just the two of them, singing “songs, and duets, and trios as soon as the ink was dry on the paper.” At the very least, the experience provided “good training for my sight-reading.” It also mattered to her that he was investing so much of himself in an opera about black Americans.
When I went to his apartment . . . he would play through the music. Then I would eat lunch with him, and he would sometimes, once or twice, invite me into his bed. Of course, I never went there. After lunch he would play the whole opera over again on his Hammond organ! And make all sorts of variations on the different themes. He would sing and he would ask me to sing; we had fun! . . . He was so proud of this music, it was his baby. It also expressed his acceptance of all forms, his love for the elements of the rhythm and the harmonies of black men.
When Gershwin offered her the opera’s leading female role, Brown recalled,
I had suspected for some time that he would say just that. Even so, it came as a surprise. “Bess is, in the original story, a very black woman,” he said. “But I cannot see any reason why my Bess shouldn’t have a café au lait complexion. Can you?” “No, no,” I answered quickly. And gave him a big hug. Then I asked him, “what will you do if the Theatre Guild insists on engaging another singer for the Bess role?” “They’ll have to do it over my dead body,” he said.
Some time thereafter, over lunch at a café near the Alvin Theatre, where rehearsals were being held, the composer solemnly informed her that the opera, referred to as Porgy in all earlier conversations, would from now on be known as Porgy and Bess. Also, he told her that “from the beginning you have harassed me to find a place for Bess to sing ‘Summertime.’ ” “It’s the most beautiful melody in the whole opera,” I said, “I love it.” “Just keep still and listen now. I composed a trio for Lily and Serena and Maria for that spot in Act III but I have decided to drop the trio and let you sing your favorite melody.6 It’s very logical; I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. Are you happy now, Miss Brown?” he said. I wouldn’t allow myself to cry in front of him, so I said nothing.7
Todd Duncan, a decade older than Brown and a voice teacher at Howard University in Washington, D.C., was hired as the show’s male lead very differently. According to Brown, she and soprano Abbie Mitchell, who was cast as Clara, were in Gershwin’s apartment one day late in 1934 when Mitchell proposed Duncan as a candidate for Porgy. Duncan’s classical backround had made him suspicious of Gershwin and what he fancied as “show business stuff,” and at first he had no interest. But when Gershwin called to suggest an audition, he found it hard to say no. On a Sunday not long before Christmas 1934, he arrived at the door of Gershwin’s apartment with a stack of music under his arm. He asked first to sing an Italian aria, which the composer accompanied from the sheet music.8 Duncan recalled,
I sang about eight bars, and I was standing beside him. He said, “Do you know this?” “Yes, I know it.” “I want to look at your face when you sing.” So I went around in the bow of the piano, and he played it, and looked at me while I was singing—he had memorized it that quickly! I sang the same eight bars, and he stopped me and asked, “Will you be my Porgy?” “Well,” I said, “I don’t know whether I could or not. I’d have to hear your music.” He laughed. “Well, I think we can arrange for you to hear some of my music. Would you come back next Sunday and sing for some other people?”
A week later Duncan returned to New York with an accompanist, as well as his wife Gladys, for what was to be a two-way audition. Singing for the Theatre Guild’s board of directors, Duncan had expected to perform three or four songs but ended up singing much more—opera, Negro spirituals, German lieder, and French chansons. Then George and Ira “stood there with their awful, rotten, bad voices and sang the whole score,” and Duncan found himself caught up in the flow of music.
He just kept playing; they kept singing. He turned around and grinned. The more they played, the more beautiful I thought the music was. By the time twenty minutes or a half hour had passed I just thought I was in heaven. These beautiful melodies in this new idiom—it was something I had never heard.
Early in the run-through of Act II, the composer paused, turned to Duncan, and announced: “This is your great aria. This is going to make you famous.” “It was a little ditty,” thought Duncan about “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” but so infectious and so beautiful. “Well, they finally finished, and when he ended with ‘I’m on My Way,’ I was crying.”
Later Gershwin coached Duncan on singing that banjo song. “This is a bitter song and you have to sing it with tongue-in-cheek; you have to sing it smiling all the time. Because what you’re doing is making fun of . . . people who make money and to whom power and position is very important.”9 A pair of lines in the bridge section (lines over which the writers had “labored in pain”) were the key: “I got no lock on the door, that’s no way to be. / They can steal the rug from the floor, that’s okay with me.” Beyond the attitude that came with Porgy’s role, since he had to sing the entire opera on his knees, Duncan would quickly run out of breath. He found it helped to sing this song lying on his back, “and that used to bring the house down; boy, it sure did! . . . Then I would rise up and they just wouldn’t let me stop.”
By the time staging rehearsals began in August, Brown and Duncan knew their parts almost perfectly. Duncan and his wife found an apartment near the Alvin Theatre, which allowed him and Brown to rehearse together. “We knew that this was going to be an important opera and we were professionals,” he recalled. Most of the cast were highly trained as well, though some proved unschooled in certain ways of the world—unfamiliar, for example, with “happy dust.” John W. (“Bubbles”) Sublett, who played Sporting Life and who offered the chorus girls marijuana in spare moments, did know about happy dust, but nothing about reading music. When he arrived for rehearsals in August with his part barely explored, and clueless about how to learn it, his sketchy grasp of the role frustrated conductor Alexander Smallens. Infuriating, too, was that Bubbles did not feel bound by the production’s rehearsal schedule. According to Oscar Levant, only the composer’s presence at a rehearsal one day saved his place in the cast:
Gershwin shared the opinion of Fred Astaire that the slim, dapper Negro was one of the great performers of the day and a dancer beyond compare. Moreover, he had shaped the part to fit Bubbles’s talents. But Bubbles’ negligence about rehearsals and promptness almost overbalanced his abilities, and on one occasion Smallens’ exasperation caused him to fling down his baton and shout to [director] Mamoulian, “I’m sick of this waiting. We’ll have to throw him out and get someone else.” Gershwin bounded from his seat. “Throw him out?” he said. “You can’t do that. Why, he’s—he’s the black Toscanini.”10
Duncan described how Gershwin taught Bubbles “all the notes, all the rhythms, all the cues—with his feet. It was brilliant. And when he learned to dance it, he never made a mistake after that.”
Duncan also singled out an unforgettable moment in one of the director’s rigorous rehearsals. As Gershwin walked in and headed for the back of the darkened theater, where he usually sat to watch, sometimes eating peanuts or smoking a cigar, Mamoulian and his cast were addressing the moment in Act II where Serena prays over the ailing Bess.11 The scene called for Porgy to sing the line “I think that maybe she gonna sleep now, a whole week gone and now she ain’t no better,” and he had to repeat it as many as ten times under the director’s relentless scrutiny. The other participants, near exhaustion after what seemed an endless cycle of repetition, found themselves part of “the exact atmosphere required for the prayer,” Duncan felt.
Miss Elzy (Serena) went down on her knees as if her own mother had been ill for weeks; she felt the need of prayer. Two seconds of silence intervened that seemed like hours, and presently there rose the most glorious tones and wails with accompanying amens and hallelujahs for our sick Bess that I ever hope to experience. This particular scene should have normally moved into the scene of the Street Cries, but it did not. It stopped there. The piano accompaniment ceased, every actor (and there were sixty-five of them) had come out of his rest position, sitting at the edge of his seat and [Mamoulian] was standing before us quietly moving his inevitable cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, his face lighted to sheer delight in realization, and then, George Gershwin like a ghost from the dark rows of the Guild theatre appeared before the footlights. He simply could not stand it. He knew then, that he had put down on paper accurately and truthfully something from the depth of soul of a South Carolina Negro woman who feels the need of help and carries her troubles to her God.12
A NATIVE of Tiflis in the country of Georgia, Rouben Mamoulian had learned English only after mastering Armenian, Russian, Georgian, French, German, and Latin. In his youth, as his affluent family moved to Paris and then back to his native city, he also learned to play the violin. At Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater, he learned that drama was best served when the director’s conception of the work touched all its facets—story, music (if any), movement, pace, visual elements—and blended them into a unified whole. He embraced the practice of “stylization,” in which a distinctive style of expression was devised and followed rigorously by the players.
Mamoulian directed his first play in English in London in 1922. The next year, he became codirector of the newly founded Eastman School of Drama and Dramatic Action in Rochester, New York, where he met Gershwin late in 1923. Author Paul Horgan, then attending Eastman, described Mamoulian as a man of wide-ranging talents who “knew more about the various contributing elements of a stage production than any of the artists separately charged with creating each. . . . more of music than the composer, more of painting than the painter, more of acting than the actor.”13
In the spring of 1927, the Theatre Guild hired him to direct the Heywards’ Porgy.14 Knowing little about the American South or African American people, Mamoulian and his stage designer paid a summer visit to Charleston, taking their measure of the place with the help of contacts provided by DuBose Heyward. What he saw there reminded him of Tiflis—the music, the hospitality of the residents, and a palpable link to the past. The “Negro life” he witnessed fit his “favorite idea of stylized, rhythmic composition” for the stage.15 After cast members were chosen for the play, Mamoulian was faced with the task of teaching them a vocabulary of motion and behavior that he had devised himself. Much of it was “utterly unrealistic,” and it took the players a while to learn. But the director had discovered that “when inner emotions are genuine, then the correctly stylized position is the most expressive one, and to the audience it appears to be completely realistic.”16
Critical reception for Porgy was excellent, and James Weldon Johnson wrote years later that the play “loomed high above every Negro drama that had ever been produced.”17 Late in 1933, when the Theatre Guild was choosing a director for the opera, Mamoulian and John Houseman were the leading candidates. By then Mamoulian had made his mark in Hollywood with such films as 1931’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1932’s Love Me Tonight, and 1933’s Queen Christina, with Greta Garbo. Houseman, who had directed Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, with an African American cast, met with Gershwin for two mornings, during which the composer played and sang the score. But as Gershwin wrote to Heyward—who favored Houseman18—the Guild decided that Mamoulian knew “more about music than any other [director] and might do a beautiful thing with the musicalization of the book,” while Houseman “might be somewhat inexperienced to handle so huge a task.”19 When offered the job, Mamoulian at first expressed shock at the very idea of an opera based on Porgy, feeling that “the play was so pure and complete in its form . . . that any attempt to translate it into operatic form might spoil it.” But on second thought he decided that if there was any composer who could manage such a transformation, it was George Gershwin.
Arriving in New York during the week of May 5, 1935, the director spent his first evening in town in Gershwin’s apartment. “The brothers handed me a tall highball and put me in a comfortable leather armchair. George sat down at the piano while Ira stood over him like a guardian angel.” Mamoulian remembered the electricity in the air, though each man was “trying to be nonchalant and poised.” When George, with Ira sitting next to him at the piano, unleashed the opening burst of instrumental music, Mamoulian found it so exciting—“so full of color and so provocative in its rhythm”—that “after this first piano section was over, I jumped out of my armchair and interrupted George to tell him how much I liked it.”
When my explosion was over . . . they both blissfully closed their eyes before they continued with the lovely “Summertime” song. . . . To describe George’s face while he sang “Summertime” is something that is beyond my capacity as a writer. . . . It was touching to see how [Ira] . . . would look from him to me with half-open eyes and pantomime with a soft gesture of his hand, as if saying, “He did it. Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t he wonderful?” George would frequently take his eyes away from the score and covertly watch me and my reaction to the music while pretending that he wasn’t really doing it at all. It was very late into the night before we finished the opera and sometimes I think that in a way that was the best performance I ever heard.20
Not long after this charmed evening, Mamoulian was back in Hollywood. The first vocal rehearsals began early in July in the studio of Alexander Steinert, the musical coach. Gershwin’s score proved demanding to learn, but the cast included musicians whose background and training had readied them for an operatic challenge. Also on hand as assistant coach was the veteran composer and songwriter J. Rosamond Johnson, who had helped to supervise the musical side of the play Porgy, and Eva Jessye, whose choir had a substantial amount of music to master.21 Mamoulian’s rehearsals began on August 26, with the director in the center of the Alvin Theatre’s stage, conductor Smallens to his right, and pianist Steinert next to the conductor. Principals and choristers were seated around these three figures. For seven hours a day during the next two weeks, the director taught the players their movements. The second week of September saw an empty stage turned into a “skeleton” of the Catfish Row set by the Russian designer Serge Soudeikine; the piano was lowered into the pit, Mamoulian and Smallens moved into theater seats, and the cast began to enact the drama.
Music critic Irving Kolodin, who had signed on for a substantial magazine article and was attending rehearsals regularly, was struck not only by Mamoulian’s technical grasp of music, but by his deep understanding of what music can communicate. He always had a copy of the score open in front of him at rehearsals, and he showed “a precise concern for measures and accents in the music,” as well as for the meaning of the words. As Mamoulian rehearsed the chorus, Kolodin watched each singer learning to act as “a genuine participant in the drama.” The director had established
in the minds of the chorus, the feeling that only an accident of fate kept them from being principal factors, rather than . . . by-standers in the drama. Any one of the men could have been Robbins, slain by a blow from the drunken Crown; any one of the women, the widowed S[ere]na. Not only Jake was drowned in the storm; each of the fishermen might have met the same ending, and the bereavement of Clara was the bereavement of all their wives.22
Yet even as he coordinated the movement of large groups of performers, Mamoulian also warned against striking regimented poses and standing around “like a chorus.” To the company as a whole, and particularly the principals, Mamoulian said during the early rehearsals: “Do the thing that comes to your mind—if I don’t like it, I’ll tell you.” For example:
When the drunken Crown is being taunted by his fellow crapshooters, Crown’s interpreter first portrayed his mounting rage by sweeping gestures. Mamoulian suggested that he remain quiet—as though brooding on the thought “Who are these fellows to make fun of me, the invincible Crown?”—before hurling his command to “Shut Up!” The change in effectiveness was amazing, and the performers instinctively cringed under the impact of Crown’s transition from silence to fury.
Still, Mamoulian’s ideas were always
susceptible to check or alteration . . . by Smallens, who supervised the tempo of each bit as it was rehearsed. Thus there would be no conflict when the singers became responsible wholly to his baton. But Smallens’ function at the rehearsals was by no means confined to tempo. His constant presence permitted him to enforce his ideas—regarding the interpretation of the score, the technical matters of singing difficult passages accurately in pitch and with the rhythmic emphasis he desired—more effectively than he could have in a few general rehearsals crowded into the end of the preparatory period. The capacity of the personnel for absorbing ideas and reproducing them was only exceeded by the complete concentration brought to their tasks by the two directors.
Porgy and Bess had its premiere performance on September 30 in Boston; by then, Mamoulian and company knew that cuts in the score were necessary. The piano-scene opening, for example, came to be judged a distraction from the mood-setting tableau, so the character of Jasbo Brown was dropped and his piano music shortened. Soon after the Broadway opening, that entire interlude was eliminated, so that the orchestral introduction moved directly to “Summertime.” Another reason to cut became clear in Boston, when the first performance ran for some four hours.23
But perhaps the cast’s most unforgettable performance had already taken place before the company moved to Boston, when singers and orchestra performed Gershwin’s score for the first time in a private read-through in Carnegie Hall. For Anne Brown, the occasion felt like a dream come true:
I remember so well that day—after weeks of rehearsals . . . when we had the first full orchestral rehearsal of the finished opera with soloists and chorus on the stage of Carnegie Hall, hired by the Theatre Guild for just that purpose. When the echoes of the last chords of Porgy and Bess had disappeared into the nearly empty hall, we were—all of us—in tears. It had been so moving. . . . George Gershwin stood on the stage as if in a trance for a few minutes. Then, seeming to awaken, he said, “This music is so wonderful, so beautiful that I can hardly believe that I have written it myself.”24