‘PORGY AND BESS’ PRODUCTION STORY

When Houston Grand Opera asked Jack O’Brien who should direct its 1976 bicentennial production of Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” he told them to hire a black woman. “I thought it should reflect a woman’s sensibility toward the black woman’s dilemma in the ‘20s,” explained O’Brien. “I suggested they hire Vanette Carol, a woman with whom I had worked in my early days in New York.”

When negotiations with Carol did not work out and rehearsals were only a month away, Houston’s music director, John DeMain, asked O’Brien to direct the production.

“I was the last person hired. At first, they were hoping that Hal Prince would do it, but Hal had schedule conflicts stretching for two years,” O’Brien said. “They were desperate.”

Houston may have been desperate, but their choice of O’Brien turned out to be inspired. The 1976 production won a Tony Award for that year’s most innovative revival, O’Brien won a Tony nomination for his staging, and the cast recording of the opera won both a Grammy Award and Europe’s Grand Prix du Disque.

In the fall of 1983, O’Brien, who had since become the artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, was asked to stage that “Porgy” production at New York’s Radio City Music Hall.

Now a revival of the Houston production is in the middle of a seven-month tour of 13 cities in an unprecedented collaboration of 13 American opera companies from Miami to Seattle. San Diego Opera will present six performances of this touring “Porgy,” opening Thursday night at the Civic Theatre.

“This production, which we opened in Miami in December, is the 10th anniversary of the Houston original,” O’Brien said in a recent interview after just returning from Orange County. The fourth stop on the opera’s tour was the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Since O’Brien had worked with the cast extensively before the Miami opening, and since many of the cast members are from the original Houston production, he was asked what he did at the Orange County performance.

“I simply wrote 38 pages of notes,” he responded. “Frankly, I sat and wrote straight through the whole opera. It takes a while for the leavening to happen in a work as complex as ‘Porgy’ .”

The multiple casts of the touring company, of course, compound the dramatic complexity. “There are two sets of principals and their covers, some of whom become principals. So it is vast, although I believe this is the most balanced cast we’ve done.”

While the songs from Gershwin’s 1935 opera quickly attained near universal popularity, the work as a whole was virtually unknown in this country. For the work’s New York debut, it was scaled down to the dimensions of a musical, and its Broadway version became the standard for decades.

O’Brien pointed out that the Houston production in 1976 was the first time that an unabridged “Porgy and Bess” had been mounted by a major American opera company. And although nearly every textbook names “Porgy and Bess” as the finest American opera, it did not reach the Metropolitan Opera stage until 1985.

“The truth of the matter is, the music of ‘Porgy and Bess’ is as popular to the American ear as the music of Puccini is to Italian ears. But for some reason we’ve had a very difficult time seeing ourselves in this vast mirror of culture. America has a great deal of difficulty looking at its own culture with any confidence,” O’Brien said.

“We have always assumed that the best cultural work comes from someplace else. It’s only within recent years that people have discovered quilts, cooking, woodworking, and any of a number of things that thrive here on this continent.” In Europe, O’Brien said, “Porgy and Bess” is a staple of the opera repertory. “They don’t understand why we have this psychotic twit that runs around saying, ‘Is this really opera or is it not?’ ”

Another controversial aspect of “Porgy and Bess” is the Gullah dialect of the DuBose Heyward libretto. “I had a little trouble in ’76 discussing the dialect with the black singers and insisting that it be ‘ dat black’--particularly as a white middle-class liberal. Imagine my surprise when I turned on PBS last winter to see the history of the English language special, and there’s an entire program on the Gullah dialect in the Carolinas.

“I finally realized that what DuBose Heyward was doing as a Carolinian was not in fact to condescend to black patois at all. It is a meticulous record of the lost Gullah dialect, so that instead of being a condescending slur, it’s a time capsule of incredible accuracy.”

Since O’Brien became associated with the Old Globe, he has curtailed his operatic direction, although last year, O’Brien directed San Diego Opera’s production of Peter Maxwell Davies’ “The Lighthouse” at the Globe. Unlike some theater directors, O’Brien does not see working on the opera stage as a cut below legitimate theater.

“When you direct for opera, there are two people in front of you bidding for attention. First is the composer; second is the conductor. And standing in the wings is (the singers’) vocal coach, who is also of major import. If you get eye contact with them once a day, you are very lucky. If you need to be center stage all the time--with everyone looking at you--you’re going to be deeply disappointed. But I always understood that.”

While O’Brien has no future opera directing engagements on his calendar, despite discussions with San Diego Opera’s general director Ian Campbell, he remains eager. “I will crawl on my hands and knees over broken glass to direct anything Mozart ever wrote.”

Houston Opera’s Roger Cantrell will conduct the “Porgy and Bess” performances in San Diego. In the role of Porgy, Donnie Rae Albert from the original Houston production will alternate with Mic Bell. Sopranos Carmen Balthrop and Henrietta Davis will alternately sing Bess. Michael Edward Stevens, who starred last summer in the La Jolla Playhouse production of “Shout Up a Morning,” shares the role of Crown with William Bradley-Davis.

The opera will play at Civic Theatre through Sunday , with both matinee and evening performances on Saturday and Sunday.