SHE’S KEEPING TABS ON ‘PORGY’

At 86, Ira Gershwin’s widow scans the operatic landscape: She says she loved the production the Houston Grand Opera gave “Porgy and Bess,” but wasn’t happy that in a British version the crippled Porgy was made to stand up--of all things!

She blames a “small heart attack” she suffered in 1985 on the production that year at the Metropolitan Opera. Her pale face still reddens at the memory: “The singers were wrong! Everything was wrong!”

But Ira and his composer brother, George, are gone, and this survivor sees it as her duty to try and make sure their intentions for “Porgy” are well served. From a Beverly Hills home decorated with the brothers’ self-portraits, she plays a key role in granting performance rights. When demand increased after the Met production, she worried that low standards might prevail. Her worry prompted the solution on view at the Orange County Performing Arts Center tonight through Sunday.

She and New York producer Sherwin M. Goldman urged 13 American opera companies to invest in one “Porgy” rather than go it on their own. That many companies had never worked together before, but it helped that the production was based on the 1976 Tony-award-winning effort by Houston Grand Opera, which Goldman co-produced.

“I wanted to maintain control,” Leonore Gershwin said. “I’m crazy about Sherwin. We had a lot of conversations and he agreed that this was a good way to do it.”

The new Opera Pacific company is managing the weeklong run in Costa Mesa. Los Angeles Music Center Opera Assn. is bringing it to the Wiltern Theater Feb. 19 through March 1. If it seems as if 13 opera companies would be a classic case of too many chefs, the joint venture apparently has worked well, largely because the overall artistic control rested with the Houston Grand Opera.

“It went very smoothly because we realized this was the only way we could all have ‘Porgy,’ ” said Speight Jenkins, general director of Seattle Opera, one of the 13 partners.

The fledgling Opera Pacific viewed this ‘Porgy’ as a strong first offering in its first season. But it would have been a struggle for any one of the organizations to bring together the black cast the Gershwin brothers envisioned. So they pooled $1.3 million for the director’s fees, sets, costumes, transportation and other shared costs. They are paying singers’ salaries and in-house costs on their own. Seattle Opera’s cost for a one-week run, for example, is expected to reach about $500,000, which Jenkins says roughly equals the cost of their average production.

“There have been collaborations of two or more companies before, but nothing on this scale,” Jenkins said.

“It stems in part from the unique requirements of ‘Porgy,’ and the demand for it. . . . I’m not sure it could have been done for any other opera or could happen again. Everybody wanted it. . . . Everybody agreed on what they wanted.”

Jack O’Brien, of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, directed the Houston Grand Opera’s 1976 production and is back for this one, which opens at San Diego Civic Theatre on March 5. Many of the singers are new. The sets are drawn from a production at Radio City Music Hall in 1983 and were not seen when the Houston production came to Los Angeles in 1977.

And if Leonore Gershwin’s old fears about Los Angeles had held sway, nobody would be seeing any “Porgy” sets here this year. This city, she thinks, has not appreciated “Porgy and Bess,” and she didn’t want the current production to make the city part of its tour.

A 1974 production by Los Angeles Civic Light Opera was “a disappointment in many respects,” she said. Also, the Los Angeles run of the Houston Grand Opera’s 1976 production was poorly attended at the Pantages.

“We’ve always had trouble in Los Angeles,” she said. “I don’t know why. Bad luck!”

Word of her objections reached officials with the Los Angeles Music Center Opera Assn. They contacted Mayor Tom Bradley, a longtime acquaintance of hers, and he wrote her a letter.

“I’ve always had very nice treatment from the mayor and he asked would I please look at the Wiltern,” she said. A special visit was arranged, complete with a pianist who demonstrated the theater’s acoustics as she walked and listened. “I liked it and I said, ‘Yes’. “

“Porgy and Bess” is a work that has suffered from interpretive ambivalence--is it a musical or an opera?--since it first opened in Boston on Sept. 30, 1935. Gershwin diluted the score to conform to various conditions that accompanied the Broadway opening in October--including certain singers’ limitations and the size of the available orchestra pit.

Critical reaction was mixed but other productions followed, mostly on the theatrical stage in this country, in opera houses abroad.

George Gershwin, a bachelor, died in Los Angeles in 1937 at the age of 38. “George wrote it as an opera,” said his sister-in-law. “That’s what he wanted.”

Despite Leonore Gershwin’s discontent with the Met production, Goldman and others believe it helped to embed the work in the operatic tradition of this country. The backers of the current tour believe it is further bolstering the work’s operatic identity through the association with opera companies nationwide. Meanwhile, the Gershwin who remains to guard the family legacy speaks cautiously of the “Porgy and Bess” she will first see at the Wiltern.

“I think it will be fine,” she said. “Sherwin is involved and I’ve learned to trust him.”