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Less than a year after Gershwin's death, Merle Armitage launched the first revival of Porgy and Bess. However, the great Southern California flood of March 3 prevented planned visits to other cities, and the tour ended prematurely. Cheryl Crawford had better luck with her 1941 revival of the work, which reduced the opera to about a two-and-a-half-hour show. Critics widely assumed that the Crawford production owed its success to its overhaul of the work's recitatives. In 1951, Columbia Records and producer Goddard Lieberson released the first near-complete recording of the opera. The idea of presenting the work abroad under government auspices proved controversial. As the Breen–Davis production toured the continent, American and Canadian audiences and critics responded enthusiastically. By this time, Porgy and Bess had become something of a global cottage industry, with two ongoing productions, both initiated in the early 1990s.

During the original Broadway run of Porgy and Bess, Gershwin prepared a five-movement orchestral suite, allegedly hoping in this way to salvage some of the music cut from the Theatre Guild production. Perhaps he prepared the suite with an eye to the work's purely instrumental sections, the better to make the transition to a symphonic setting. Porgy and Bess had various histories, but two primary ones: as a frequently performed stage work and as an important resource for popular and jazz artists. As the most successful American opera to date and one of the most internationally popular ever written—as well as one composed for an almost all-black cast—Porgy and Bess held a unique position in the annals of opera. But in light of its larger life, the work seemed to constitute a phenomenon distinct from any other piece of music in the repertoire.

This chapter addresses Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess story as it was told in 1935 awash in minstrel characterizations and then adapted in 2011 on Broadway to rethink how the depth inherent in the original characters could be made more visible. This analysis fleshes out the larger view of black womanhood in the 1930s and the first decades of the twenty-first century. This chapter also explores the opera in terms of constructions of the folk, the Harlem Renaissance, and the efforts of black writers (Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Harold Cruse, and James Baldwin) to come to grips with its negative stereotypes and celebrated opportunities for black performers in virtuosic roles.

Porgy and Bess, which could now be considered as much a “folk” as a “jazz” opera, occupied George Gershwin and Dubose Heyward for about two years, from the fall of 1933 to its Broadway premiere on October 10, 1935. The aspect of the novel Porgy that initially earned the most praise—its portrayal of Charleston's blacks—became over time its most controversial feature. Moreover, the main characters belong to a larger community that itself takes center stage, a group victimized within by substance abuse, violence, quackery, and superstition, and without by racism, injustice, and nature, yet still hopeful and inspiring in its compassion and faith. The work's use of popular dialects and musical idioms, and its congeniality to improvisation and varied vocal styles mark it a folk opera.

This chapter details Gershwin's early contacts with African American music and musicians. His Blue Monday Blues of 1922, a failed attempt at writing an operatic scene about Negro characters, is sung by whites in blackface. The chapter also discusses his thoughts on Jewish artists and African American music. Fifteen years later, Gershwin's masterpiece, a folk opera, Porgy and Bess, comes to Broadway and receives mixed reviews. The orchestration question is resolved at the end of the chapter.

This chapter challenges the assumption that George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess is something done by whites to blacks by highlighting the indispensable, active role played by African American performers in every critically successful production of the opera. Porgy and Bess has been the subject of controversy for decades owing to its depiction of African Americans. Many of the arguments against Gershwin's work casts African Americans as the victims of malevolent or thoughtless white actions. This chapter examines how Porgy and Bess came into being as an opportunity for productive interracial collaboration by focusing on the Theatre Guild production of 1935, one of several postwar productions of Porgy and Bess that have managed to bring performers and the director together. It also considers Gershwin's respect for his cast members as individuals and concludes with a discussion of five case studies that speak of the tension in the relationship between white directorial staff and black performers in Porgy and Bess, including the production of Samuel Goldwyn's 1959 Technicolor film about Catfish Row.

This chapter presents the text of George Gershwin's explanation about the origin and scheme for his music in the folk opera Porgy and Bess, which was published in the October 20, 1935, issue of the New York Times. Gershwin explained that he called it the work a folk opera because the story is a folk tale. He adds that Porgy and Bess brought the Negro life in America to the operatic form elements that have never before appeared in opera and he explains how he adapted his method to utilize the drama, the humor, and religious fervor of the race.

This chapter details events in Sidney Poitier's life from 1957–1959, focusing on his films Porgy and Bess and The Defiant Ones. Poitier initially rejected the lead in Porgy and Bess because it presented blacks as dice-rolling, gin-swilling, razor-toting stereotypes. On the other hand, The Defiant Ones was a film that Poitier wanted—a taut, action-packed drama that challenged racial prejudice. He was later given an ultimatum by Samuel Goldwyn to either accept both parts or accept neither. In early December 1957, out of some combination of ambition and racial responsibility, Poitier signed a $75,000 contract for Porgy and Bess and a $15,000 contract for The Defiant Ones.

The Theatre Guild approached Mamoulian to direct the 1935 premiere of Gershwin's “folk opera” Porgy and Bess. Insisting on artistic control, Mamoulian helped shape the musical with an all-black cast into the form familiar today, with Gershwin agreeing to many of his suggested cuts. Porgy and Bess quickly became a classic of American theatre.

This chapter presents an excerpt from Joseph Swain's 1990 book The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey focusing on George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess. Swain analyzes what got Gershwin interested in turning DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy into an opera. He suggests that it could be the spirituals or Heyward's apparent success in getting at the heart of the black community.

This chapter presents the text of Brooks Atkinson and Olin Downes' review of the premiere of George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess in New York, which was published in the October 11, 1935, issue of the New York Times. Both critics wrote positive review of the show. This chapter suggestd that the side-by-side publication of these two reviews is indicative of the importance of the Porgy and Bess premiere on the American music scene of this time.

This chapter explores representations of blackness in opera in relation to masculinity and morality. More specifically, it considers the changing codes of masculinity in leading male roles and how they are calibrated differently for white European characters and nonwhite characters with non-European ancestry. It also looks at the ways in which masculinity and heroism are brought together differently for black and non-black characters. In order to elucidate these issues, the chapter analyzes Giuseppe Verdi's Otello (1887), focusing on its references to getting the “chocolate” ready and the way Verdi dramatizes Otello's vicious murder of Desdemona. Four other operas written in the first half of the twentieth century, two of which feature white European title characters and the other two feature African American protagonists, are examined: Alban Berg's Wozzeck (1925), Ernst Krenek's Jonny spielt auf (1927), George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935), and Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes (1945).

This chapter presents the text of Nanette Kutner's 1936 account of the role of radio in the production of George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess. Kutner reveals that Gershwin's 1934 radio show Music by Gershwin was instrumental in underwriting the production costs of Porgy and Bess. She also recounts the time when Gershwin confided to her about his plan to do an opera out of the book Porgy.

This chapter describes the part played by Cab Calloway in the revival of Porgy and Bess. The depression that had enveloped Cab since he laid off his big band began to lift as he threw himself into the challenge of singing in the revival of Porgy and Bess. Calloway's main feature song here was “There's a Boat That's Leaving Soon for New York.” His vocal mannerism of soaring into falsetto for occasional words seems initially unsettling, but the sly confidentiality with which he entices Bess, one of the characters in the play, is very moving. Porgy and Bess, was presented briefly to the Nixon Theatre in Pittsburgh before being extended for a further month at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C.

This chapter presents the text of the transcribed version of Anne Brown's 1995 interview with Robert Wyatt concerning her thoughts about the production of George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess. Brown played the original role of Bess in the opera. In the interview she describes her first meeting with Gershwin, her audition for the role, and the preparations they made for the premiere of the opera in New York.

This chapter focuses on musicals during the Depression. Musicals remained largely escapist and engaged in social critique mainly for novelty. The discussion includes the following musicals: I'd Rather Be Right (1937), Pins and Needles (1937), The Cradle Will Rock (1937), Lady in the Dark (1941), and Porgy and Bess (1935).

The pre-premiere publicity for Oklahoma! generated by the Theatre Guild fixed many of the themes that would dominate its reception history. The Guild had already established a pattern of creating musical versions of plays it had previously staged, by way of George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess of 1935. Its executive director, Theresa Helburn, tried to persuade a number of Broadway composers to pick up the torch, including Kurt Weill (for Ferenc Molnár’s play Liliom, which later became Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel). She also saw some potential in Lynn Rigg’s Green Grow the Lilacs, first done by the Guild in late 1930. Riggs was one of a new generation of “regional” playwrights, and he drew on his own upbringing in Claremore, Oklahoma, for a work interweaving vernacular dialogue and cowboy songs. Rodgers and Hammerstein, however, came from quite other theatrical traditions; anything they did would necessarily be very different.

Hermes Pan stages dances for James Cagney in Never Steal Anything Small at Universal-International Pictures before starting work on Porgy and Bess for Samuel Goldwyn. He then moves on to television where he wins an Emmy Award for his choreography for An Evening with Fred Astaire. He returns to Twentieth Century-Fox to choreograph The Blue Angel and Can-Can, the film that scandalized Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev during his visit to the United States. For Astaire, Pan staged the dance sequences in The Pleasure of His Company at Paramount and Another Evening with Fred Astaire and Astaire Time for television. For Ross Hunter, Pan choreographed a $4,000,000 production of Flower Drum Song created a spectacular dream ballet to the music of “Sunday.”