The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess

Reviewed by Bob Verini

The lean though not especially mean, 40% fat free The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess came into being on a whim and a prayer.

As widely reported a year ago, the songwriters’ estate sought to purvey a version of the Catfish Row perennial that would minimize the vocal, logistical, and running-time demands traditionally only within the grasp of the opera house. At the same time, American Repertory Theater director Diane Paulus – respected renewer of the vintage musicals Hair and Pippin – had a notion to beef up the Bess role, which she perceived as something of a passive doormat. And Paulus found eager co-conspirators in playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and actress Audra McDonald.

Parks’s librettist skills were doubtful at best, having previously been displayed in the Pasadena Playhouse’s woeful Ray Charles Live!, and no less a sage than Stephen Sondheim was on record against the The Gershwins’ P&B project’s impertinence and disrespectfulness, even before its Boston tryout. Despite pre-production slings and arrows, New York critical raves paved the way for the show’s Tony Awards (Best Revival and Best Lead Actress).

For all the awards and publicity, however, the production barely eked out a nine-month Broadway run. The public took to Audra but not to Porgy Lite, and the reasons why are plain to see in the current Ahmanson tour stop. Yes, the evening is tighter. But if the creative team assumed that a briefer melodrama is a better melodrama, it ain’t necessarily so. Fans of the mighty original won’t love this piece any better, and those previously blind to the opera’s virtues are unlikely to change their position now.

The plot does zip along. Some of the cuts – in the interminable hurricane sequence, for instance – are welcome. Infusions of dance contribute to the community feel along Catfish Row, from the well-cast, spirited ensemble. Christopher Akerlind’s lighting, perhaps this production’s one incontestable triumph, subtly signals mood changes and deepens the tension throughout. Riccardo Hernandez’s boarded-up rear wall has been criticized for denuding the story of time and place, but actually presents a potent metaphor for decades of poverty and landlords’ benign neglect.

People forget that the Row was originally a complex of elegant antebellum mansions; with elements of ornate windows peeping out from between the sad plywood panels, Hernandez’s set seems to say, “Here’s what we used to be.” Put it this way: If the Berliner Ensemble unveiled this set as an abstract statement on American urban blight, it would be hailed worldwide.

But where’s the grit and guts we were led to expect? Leads Nathaniel Stampley and Alicia Hall Moran seem, ironically, far more interested in making beautiful sounds appropriate to the opera house, than getting down and dirty in the titular couple’s battles with lust and “happy dust.” Kingsley Leggs’ Sporting (not “Sportin’” any more) Life is a stock song-and-dance man light on menace and purpose. Only Alvin Crawford’s Crown seems touched with genius in incarnating a proud, amoral force of nature who brings real terror to Bess’s rape on Kittwah Island.

In Parks’s adaptation, Bess certainly gets more stage time and a better chance to present her conflicted character than ever before, but it’s almost completely at the expense of Porgy, whose name, lest we forget, solely bore the title of DuBose Heyward’s original novel; this has always been his story: A crippled, self-loathing beggar wrapped in self-pity, he learns through Bess enough self-respect, self-sacrifice and responsibility to embolden him onto a thousand-mile journey – on a goat cart no less – to win her back from sin. What a character arc! – especially since it parallels Bess’s own attempted progress toward salvation.

Well, in this production the goat cart is gone, and so is the character arc. Stampley is one-note noble-and-sanguine from his first moments; he’s such a sage character, you feel even the brutish Crown ought to recognize his superior virtue. Did Paulus and Parks feel that Bess’s preeminence – her stage business includes sniffing cocaine off the main street of Catfish Row – required reducing Porgy to plaster sainthood? If they were going to alter the title, why not go all the way and call it “Bess and Her Men”? That change at least would have been honest.

It must be reported that at the Ahmanson opening night, so poor was the sound mix that many of Ira Gershwin’s lyrics hit the air in a hopeless muddle. At least over at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, they give you supertitles.

Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Avenue, dwntwn.; Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 p.m.; Sun., 1 & 6:30 p.m. (no perf Wed., April 30; no 6:30 perfs May 25 and June 1; added perf Thurs., May 22 & May 29, 2 p.m.); through June 1. (213) 972-4400, www.centertheatregroup.org