Clarke Peters & Nicola Hughes in Porgy and Bess

Perhaps, however, one can go home again. That's the proposition behind Nunn's return to the material, this time as a shortened, re-orchestrated theatre piece that can be sung by a single cast eight times a week, as opposed to the rotating company needed when this work is delivered to an opera house. (A Houston Grand Opera production, directed by Jack O'Brien, caused a Broadway stir three decades ago, employing precisely such a casting method.) Over a decade in planning, Nunn beat out competing interest from his colleague Richard Eyre in reconsidering anew, and for a larger audience, the story of life on Catfish Row—the fictional South Carolina slum community that had previously been treated as a novel and a play by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, working separately and/or

The Porgy and Bess Ensemble

together. The tale is one of love and lust centering on the beggar Porgy and his beloved Bess, a prostitute who, in turn, exists in thrall to the murderous Crown. Completing the principals is Sportin' Life, the gambler and drug dealer who whisks Bess away to the fabled land that is New York—the very terrain, of course, that the Gershwins called home, which has always been one of the reasons why some commentators object to this treatment of African-American southerners by an East Coast (and Caucasian) creative team.

Clarke Peters, the London-based American who is playing Porgy this time around opposite Nicola Hughes's Bess, is the first to admit that he had his doubts, though he is quick to add that such qualms have since been allayed. "Over the years, the story of Porgy and Bess has had a bad rap, without people seeing it, I think, and without people really knowing it. It's cited as one of those degrading things for African-Americans to be seen speaking like that and behaving like that. Some of that hit a generation of African-Americans and stayed with them, myself included." What changed Peters' own estimation of a work first seen in 1935 and boasting a score that by anyone's reckoning remains a glory? (Among the songs on offer are "Summertime," "I Got Plenty o' Nuttin," and "It Ain't Necessarily So"—and that's just for starters.) Peters traveled to South Carolina several months ago for research purposes and found, to his surprise, that "there are people who speak in that dialect." So it wasn't long before he was brought around to Nunn's encompassing humanist vision of the piece. Says the actor: "Porgy is a classic piece of American theatre [that has] got a bum steer from the beginning of its history; it's used to hard knocks."

Trevor Nunn

For all his work in the world of opera, Nunn hasn't been all that used to playing to a coterie audience. As one might expect from the director of Cats, Starlight Express, Les Miserables and countless other large-scale musicals, he isn't afraid of reaching out to the largest possible public—even if, sometimes (Starlight Express, for sure) the critics don't always go the distance with him. But let him explain it: "I did the Glyndebourne production [of Porgy] three times and then again in an expanded, changed form at the Royal Opera House, and that became the production that led to the TV version," which lives on via DVD and video. "All of those were kind of variations on a theme. But having done it all those times, I had always been terribly disappointed that the number of performances were very few and that the range of the audience has been very narrow. And, therefore, I felt what we were doing was fulfilling only one half of George [Gershwin's] intention, which was, ‘Take me seriously,’ but not fulfilling the other half, which was about reaching the widest possible audience. And what I had recalled when I was researching the Glyndebourne production in the first instance was that although George said it was very important to him that what he was constructing was an opera, he also said it was very important that it reach the widest possible audience. He wanted to write an opera that crossed boundaries—that wasn't seized as something only for aficionados or for people who can afford to go to the Metropolitan Opera."

Nunn goes on: "What we're doing here doesn't change the seriousness of the intention. I think in many ways what we're trying to do is intensify the authenticity of the society that is presented on stage: the characterisations and the detail of the people." At the same time, he continues, "what we have is an adaptation of the musical registers of the score, so that instead of the work being for very high soprano voices and a high tenor or baritone, we are doing the show in the vocal range that we associate with music theatre. Of course something very different and very visceral then occurs when you don't take the step up into the operatic range; it feels much more like the music is coming straight out of the situation, straight from the street."

That precise task has fallen to musical adapter Gareth Valentine, the West End conductor, arranger and composer (his credits range from Chicago to Wicked, to name just two ongoing shows), whose prior collaborations with Nunn include The Baker's Wife, Aspects of Love, Anything Goes and Acorn Antiques. On this assignment, Valentine points to his provision of original dance music, scene change music, and underscoring—"everything that makes a musical a

Clarke Peters & Nicola Hughes in Porgy and Bess

comprehensive whole." Taking the broader view of the piece in its entirety, says Valentine, "this was Gershwin's first go at writing opera, and I believe he would have got much better at it." (Instead, George Gershwin died of an inoperable brain tumour in 1937, age 38, though his elder brother, lyricist Ira, lived until 1983). "I believe some of [the piece] is overwritten, and as a general rule, there's too much of it, so that the structure tends to stop the narrative rather than move it on." Is he worried about what the Porgy completists might say? "I don't think we want to be encumbered with what the purists think because we're rendering it in a completely new form, which it has to have. If we start thinking this is the holy grail and sacrosanct, we go nowhere—and in that case we would not have had something like Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake. The point is—this will open up the story to people who wouldn't otherwise see it. And," he laughs, "it's amazing how many people think Porgy and Bess is a musical already."

None of this would have happened, however, without the support of the various estates that look after the material—and there are separate ones for George and Ira Gershwin. Michael Strunsky, the San Francisco-based trustee and executor of the Ira Gershwin Estate, was among those at a May 2005, Cambridge Theatre read-through of Nunn's vision—and version—of the show where, reports Strunsky, "Trevor proved to the satisfaction of both interests that his ideas for a new musical were very exciting and could be produced." In any case, he argues, any truly enduring aesthetic creation is open to reassessment and reinterpretation: "I think a real work of art like Porgy should never be categorised as definitive in one production or another. There's always a new ‘definitive' coming down the road"—as this staging may well go on to prove. So committed are the Gershwin estates to giving Nunn's latest approach its due that, says Strunsky, "we are delaying productions in London and New York of Porgy and Bess, the opera, during the first two or three years of Porgy and Bess, the musical." But there's no doubt that the work's source remains undimmed: this show's full title, after all, is The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, lest there be any doubt as to its provenance. Valentine is quick with praise when it comes to the Estates' support: "I honestly thought we were going to be policed by an array of musicologists or something but that has not been the case; they gave it their full blessing. They trust Trevor implicitly, and so they should with that pedigree. I hope people will understand that this has been done with exceptional integrity and care. We're conscious that we've got George standing by our shoulders but that we must push the envelope where we feel it serves the drama." Brand new, for instance, are Don Sebesky's orchestrations, though the design team of John Gunter, Sue Blane, and David Hersey represents the same trio Nunn used at Glyndebourne.

For all his understandable earnestness on the topic, Nunn allows himself a bit of levity, comparing what he has attempted here to his musical years ago for the RSC of The Comedy of Errors, "which became a cult show even though there were people who said you can't do that to a Shakespeare play." This time round, he says beseechingly, "Please don't imagine that coming to see this version, you're going to see a totally different take on Catfish Row. We're not setting it in a hotel complex in Acapulco, or wherever. I'm hoping in many ways that this will seem to be a different take on the same production." And anyway, he adds, "the opera's still there for anybody to do at any point at any time in any production; nothing has changed. This is additional"—two Porgys, in other words, from the single hands of one inspired director.