Clarke Peters & Nicola Hughes
in Porgy and Bess
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By way of testing in theatrical terms the adage that lightning can indeed strike twice, this month sees the arrival at the Savoy Theatre of perhaps the single most intriguing entry in this London year's ceaselessly busy lineup of musicals: Porgy and Bess in a new £3.5 million production directed by Trevor Nunn. The very same director was responsible for the pioneering 1986 production of Porgy at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, a vision of the piece as a true American landmark that rose above decades of politically correct carping with the same grace and fury with which—in that staging, anyway—Willard White's crippled Porgy cast aside his crutches at the final moment: a mighty image of transcendence matched by Simon Rattle's conducting of the George and Ira Gershwin score.
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
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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."
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