Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Porgy and Bess Plot Reverts Closer to Original

This article about the upcoming production of Porgy and Bess appeared in yesterday's New York Times. It would appear that at least some of the changes to the show that had caused such an uproar in the press will not be making the trip down from Cambridge, MA to Broadway. Check out Patrick Healy's article below.


‘Porgy’: No New Scene, Some Hard Feelings
By PATRICK HEALY
Published: November 14, 2011

There will be no revisionist happy ending in the coming Broadway production of “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.” A new scene, in which the title characters have a final emotional encounter meant to deepen their love story, has been dropped. But some hard feelings remain, at least on the part of the show’s director and its lead producer.


It has been three months since Stephen Sondheim shocked the theater world with a rare public rebuke of fellow artists — the creative team of this “Porgy and Bess” — for changes to the landmark 1935 opera that they were rehearsing. The director, Diane Paulus, and the producer, Jeffrey Richards, largely stayed silent. And in their first joint interview since the scolding, they insisted — in between expressions of frustration — that they had moved on from L’Affaire Sondheim.

“Are we not saying his name?” Ms. Paulus said of Mr. Sondheim over coffee at a Broadway neighborhood restaurant last Friday.

“It can be said,” Mr. Richards replied, without ever going on to say it.

Ms. Paulus, best known for directing the 2009 hit revival of “Hair” (which Mr. Richards produced), forcefully repeated during the interview that the estates of George and Ira Gershwin and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward had asked her team to change the opera to fit commercial Broadway. The production, which had a tryout run at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., in late summer, is set to start preview performances on Dec. 17 at the Richard Rodgers Theater.

On one issue Ms. Paulus was particularly emphatic: She and her team, not Mr. Sondheim, were responsible for dropping the most controversial changes contemplated for the show.

“We were learning about the work as we were living it, experimenting with different scenes and endings, and by the culmination of our journey with Porgy and Bess — the show and those characters — we found its strongest version,” Ms. Paulus said. “It had nothing to do with Mr.-Whomever-we-are-not-talking-about, or the producers or the estates.”

In August, shortly before the American Repertory Theater tryout began, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Boston Phoenix published articles that noted a new, upbeat ending for Broadway.

Instead of Bess’s leaving their Charleston ghetto for New York by herself, with the crippled Porgy giving chase some time later, the Broadway version would include a newly invented scene in which Bess tries to persuade Porgy to start a new life with her up North. She leaves, followed by Porgy; one final stage picture that was considered had the two looking at each other at a distance. The intent was to indicate that Porgy and Bess would be reunited.

Mr. Sondheim, the composer and writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize for “Sunday in the Park With George” and multiple Tony Awards for shows like “Follies” and “Sweeney Todd,” sent a letter to The Times chastising Ms. Paulus; Suzan-Lori Parks, who adapted the book for the production; and the actress Audra McDonald, who plays Bess, for making comments that he found condescending and disdainful of the original opera. He also chided the team for the new ending and other rewrites that deviate from more common reinterpretations of the staging, design or orchestrations of classic musicals.

Ms. Paulus declined to discuss her immediate reaction to Mr. Sondheim’s letter, but people familiar with the situation said that soon after reading it, she called him and left a phone message in hopes of talking it out before the letter was published. They spoke on condition of anonymity because their conversation with Ms. Paulus about the phone message was private; they said they did not know if the two ultimately spoke.

In the days after the publication of Mr. Sondheim’s letter, as hundreds of artists and others began weighing in on blogs about Mr. Sondheim’s complaints, Ms. Paulus said, she and her cast tried to focus on the positive.

“I think it was a tribute to how passionate people are about this masterwork,” she said. “We were determined to put our heads down and do our work.”

The final stage moment of Porgy and Bess’s looking at each other was rehearsed and discarded even before Mr. Sondheim’s letter was made public, Ms. Paulus said. The new scene between Porgy and Bess, meanwhile, had been important to Ms. Parks and Ms. McDonald, who both said in interviews over the summer that they believed that Bess should appear during the final 15 minutes of the two-and-a-half-hour musical. Variations of that scene were included during preview performances at the American Repertory Theater, but it was cut before opening night.

“Our goal for the piece was for the audience to be completely connected to both the characters of Porgy and Bess through to the last second of the piece, and I think we learned how to do that,” Ms. Paulus said. “I’m so reluctant to talk about the details of the ending because, frankly, I don’t want it to get misinterpreted. I don’t want someone to read it and go crazy.”

Mr. Richards also had fallout to deal with. He lost some of his investors for the $8 million Broadway production, but said he also gained some new ones, whom he declined to name.

Mr. Richards made the somewhat unusual decision to produce “Porgy and Bess” as a limited, 26-week run on Broadway, instead of a run of a year or longer. Asked why he opted to budget for a limited engagement (which could be extended if the show is a hit), Mr. Richards said: “Because of all of the controversy that had been going on. We didn’t know how it would play out.”

Ms. Paulus is now looking ahead to casting understudies and planning for rehearsals, which are scheduled to begin on Nov. 28. Modifications are under way to the set design, which was unusually spare in Cambridge, and some of the music will be in a different key for Broadway. The orchestra is also growing to 22 musicians from 18, with the addition of several string instruments.

As for the guest list, Mr. Richards was coy about whether he would invite Mr. Sondheim, who declined to be interviewed for this article. (“I’ve said everything I have to say,” he wrote in an e-mail, adding that he did plan to see the Broadway production.)

“If he wants to come see the show, we would welcome him to see what his theater colleagues have accomplished with respect and love,” Mr. Richards said. “Out of respect for him, I don’t want a firestorm — an invitation would be a private thing.”

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