Sluggish Gershwin at the Metropolitan Opera

About two weeks after PBS released the Great Performances at the Met broadcast of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, it released the eighth installment in the series, George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. This time the video source came from a Live in HD transmission, since the opera was shown in movie theaters this past February 1. While this opera was first performed in 1935, it did not enter the Metropolitan Opera repertoire until 1985. By that time New Yorkers had been able to see the Houston Grand Opera production, directed by Jack O’Brien in 1976, when it toured the Uris Theatre in September of that year, after the conclusion of the Houston season. That production was then revived in 1983 and performed at Radio City Music Hall, which was my own “first contact” with the opera.

Here in San Francisco, the Houston production was shared with the San Francisco Opera (SFO), where it was first performed on June 21, 1977. That production was then revived in the spring of 1987 and again in the spring of 1995. However, after David Gockley moved from Houston to San Francisco, he decided that SFO should have a new production of Porgy and Bess. That version was staged by Francesca Zambello, and it became my second encounter with the opera on June 21, 2009. Both of those productions were highly satisfying experiences.

Sadly, I cannot say the same about the new Met staging by James Robinson. Most important is that, while both O’Brien and Zambello had a keen sense of pace in playing out the narrative from beginning to end, Robinson’s staging felt like an interminable slog. The problem may have originated in the agenda behind the production itself. That agenda can be found on the Great Performances Web page for this program:

This Met Opera production takes a fresh approach to a complicated masterpiece, which has been criticized for its African American stereotypes since its 1935 debut. The setting — Catfish Row, a Charleston, South Carolina neighborhood – is now a close-knit, aspirational working-class community in which everyone is doing his or her best to get by, instead of an abandoned slum.

That premise is further elaborated by Robinson as follows:

The inhabitants of Catfish Row are integral to everything that’s going on with every other character. You get to know how this community functions. It’s a very religious community—they’re bound by their faith. Every individual in that community of Catfish Row, every member of the chorus, has a story.

Eric Owens and Angel Blue as the title characters in Porgy and Bess (from the Live in HD event page)

While all this may look good on paper, the result was a staging with too much of everything. Indeed, the choreography by Camille A. Brown was so abundant that one could almost take all the dancing to be a Greek chorus commenting on the narrative behind the libretto written by DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin. Furthermore, while Eric Owens gave a thoroughly compelling account of Porgy for Zambello (making his role debut in the process), his presence in Robinson’s “community” frequently ran the risk of coming across as merely incidental. Similarly, Angel Blue’s Bess for Robinson came across as little more than a junkie that “came clean” through Porgy’s influence, only to fall back into the habit due to Sportin’ Life (Frederick Ballentine).

In an interview with The New York Times, Robinson claimed that he did not want any of the characters in Porgy and Bess to devolve into caricatures. While he may have gotten beyond the sorts of stereotypes that one tended to expect in 1935, his attention to “community” seems to have developed its own set of caricatures. Furthermore, by prioritizing the community over the individuals, the number of those caricatures became overwhelming. As a result, Robinson’s production turned out to be too much of everything except the core relationship between Porgy and Bess.