It was 5° above zero when the 85 members of the Porgy and Bess company got to Leningrad, the first American theatrical troupe ever to visit Russia. Jammed on the station platform to greet them with bouquets of white chrysanthemums were hundreds of officials and theatrical personalities, backed by thousands of unofficial well-wishers. First of the all-Negro cast off the train was John McCurry (who plays Crown). McCurry stretched his 6-ft.-6-in., 265-lb. frame and muttered, “This is T-shirt weather in Minnesota!”
Then, as the crowd closed in and handed him a bouquet, he beamed, “Well, bless yo’ HI’ pointed heads.”
Sunny Side. Wherever the Americans went, Russians gathered to stare, creating traffic jams. Traffic was blocked for a mile when 1,000 Russians surrounded Earl Jackson (who alternates as Sportin’ Life) and Helen Thigpen (Serena), out for a stroll, with Jackson wearing cowboy boots, an Argentine nutria coat and hat, and custom-made pigskin gloves equipped with four holes through which his six emerald-and-diamond rings glittered.
The Americans caused a near riot them selves on their second night in town when they staged Russia’s first jam session at the staid Astoria Hotel. As one member of the cast put it: “The band was doing up Cherokee. It was strictly from the cob. Man, it was square! Lorenzo Fuller [an alternate Sportin’ Life] decided to go scalp the piano. Ned Wright [Robbins] felt the spirit striving and took everybody to the sunny side of the street . . . One of the Russian cats got the spirit and did a buck and wing routine that flipped everybody’s wig. Everything was copacabana, just like the tree—all root.”
In Leningrad’s Evangelical Baptist Church, members of the cast worshiped with 2,000 Russians, mostly elderly women wrapped in shawls, before a big sign reading, GOD is LOVE. Wearing a platinum mink cape, Rhoda Boggs (Lily, the strawberry woman, in the show) sang Sweet Little Jesus Boy. Then, with deep religious feeling, the Negroes sang Christmas carols (Joy to the World) and spirituals (Every Time I Feel the Spirit). By the time they left, many of the Russians were weeping openly. Some said to Moses LaMarr, “God bless you. Merry Christmas. We love you.” Not understanding a word, LaMarr solemnly replied, “The same to you.”
Sex on Catfish Row. At the opening last week in the huge auditorium of the Palace of Cultural and Industrial Cooperatives, the Stars and Stripes flew beside the Hammer and Sickle while the band played The Star-Spangled Banner and the Anthem of the Soviet Union. The house was packed, and dapper Lorenzo Fuller brought it down before the curtain went up by saying, “Dobro Pozhalovat Druzya —Welcome, friends.”
Porgy shocked the Russians with its portrayal of life in the raw and sex in the open along Catfish Row on the Charleston, S.C. waterfront. The audience reacted with gasps. But at the final curtain they rushed the stage and gave the cast a ten-minute ovation. Radio Moscow called it “a great success.”
Although the State Department helped finance Porgy for 25 months in its tours of South America, Europe and the Middle East, it refused to subsidize a trip to the Soviet Union for the 20-year-old George Gershwin-DuBose Heyward folk opera about poor Negroes in the South. The Russians underwrote the tour themselves at a cost of $150,000. With a top price of 60 rubles ($15) a seat and all 25 performances in Leningrad and Moscow assured sellouts, they will get back $350,000. But whatever the State Department feared the U.S. might lose, it was plain that the charm and cheer of Porgy’s cast was spreading good will for the U.S. when the Ministry of Culture was asked how mail should be addressed to the cast, the Ministry replied: “Just address letters, Porgy and Bess, Soviet Union. The mail will reach them.”
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