Music: Folk Opera

The cripple Porgy, this time with music for himself and the 75 other blacks living in Catfish Row, returned last week to Manhattan. He was still the brainchild of Playwright DuBose Heyward, still the protege of Manhattan’s Theatre Guild which took him under its wing eight years ago. For one week Porgy and Bess, with a 700-page score by Composer George Gershwin (TIME, Sept. 30), played in Boston, won high praise. On opening night in Manhattan half the Somebodies in town crowded in to hear this latest attempt at a U. S. folk opera.

With DuBose Heyward as his librettist, Composer Gershwin kept his work faithful to the play. The Negroes of Charleston’s Catfish Row live in the same rickety tenements. They still quarrel and kill over their crap games, still shout their religion, their love and fear of ”Lawd Jesus.” Porgy, the crippled beggar, appears driving his seedy goat. The simple love story is his. Bess belongs to the murderer Crown. According to the neighbors she is “a liquor-guzzlin’ slut,” a “Happy Dust” addict. Porgy gives her shelter, buys her a divorce although she never has been married, sets out tragically with his goat to follow her when she runs off to New York.

The play Porgy left impressions which presented a stiff challenge for a Broadway-bred composer. With music frequently inspired, Mr. Gershwin manages to give new life and importance to the Negroes of Catfish Row. Conductor Alexander Smallens raises his baton and an overture sounds out like a brisk command for attention. It is Saturday night in Charleston. A shrill trumpet sets the pitch. A peppery xylophone suggests the dice, rolling to trouble.

In the crap game big drunken Crown kills Robbins and over the corpse all Catfish Row bows before death, keening and shrieking its laments, tossing coins into a saucer to assure a burial safe from medical students. Gershwin’s choruses are richly eloquent then, as they are later on when a hurricane shivers the tenements and the Negroes herd together like terror-stricken savages, hearing what they think is God. knocking at the door. Critics roundly approved such moments which had the surge of a powerful musical drama. But :here were bristling arguments over many of the set songs for which Gershwin’s brother Ira helped write lyrics. A lullaby called Summer Time is likely to become a bestseller. Fisherman Jake sings A Woman Is a Sometime Thing. Porgy’s big song begins rowdily with I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’ and Nuttin’s Plenty For Me.

No hidebound opera company could have done justice to Porgy and Bess. Few conventionally trained singers would have been plausible in its roles. Few operatic directors could have mastered its theatre. The Guild was determined, at all costs, to make the opera live. Rouben Mamoulian, who directed the original play, was summoned from Hollywood. Negroes were assembled who knew no stuffy traditions, had true feeling for rhythm. Mamoulian’s hand was particularly evident in the big mass groupings, in the way he kept the action in pace with the music. The Negroes in prayer suggested an entire down-trodden race.

The blacks in the cast proved perfect actors. Crown is strapping Warren Coleman. Flashy, irrepressible Sportin’ Life is John W. Bubbles of the dance team. Buck & Bubbles. Bess is Anne Wiggins Brown, daughter of a Baltimore physician, who learned to sing at the Juilliard School of Music. Todd Duncan, a rich-voiced baritone who heads the music department at Howard University, plays Porgy in such a way as to suggest that some day he might be a candidate for grand opera.

Porgy and Bess is not “grand,” is not intended for the musical few. Critics agreed that Composer Gershwin’s chorus and orchestration mark a notable advance in his development. Laymen left his folk opera humming with satisfaction.