It Ain’t Necessarily So : TV ‘Porgy’ Defies Claim That You Can’t Remake a Classic

Trevor Nunn couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

The English director--who ran the Royal Shakespeare Company here for 18 years and has directed such plays as “Nicholas Nickleby” and hit musicals as “Les Miserables,” “Cats,” “Starlight Express” and “Aspects of Love”--thought he had a sure thing on his hands when he was granted permission to make a movie version of George Gershwin’s opera masterpiece “Porgy and Bess.”

It had been 30 years since such permission had been granted by the Gershwin estates. But Leonore Gershwin, widow of Gershwin’s brother Ira, had seen Nunn’s triumphant 1986 production of “Porgy and Bess” with England’s Glyndebourne Opera. And she decided he was the man to film the work, which tells the story of a poverty-stricken group of African-Americans on Catfish Row in Charleston, S.C., in about 1918.

So Nunn scouted locations around Charleston, came up with a budget of $14 million and flew to Los Angeles, convinced that “Porgy and Bess” would be an easy sell to major studios.

He was wrong. The suits just shook their heads.

“The last studio I was dealing with was interested for a while, and decided to pass,” Nunn recalled. “I told the executive concerned I couldn’t understand his timidity. ‘This is a great American masterpiece,’ I said. ‘There’s potentially a gigantic audience. Most of America knows most of the score of “Porgy” (which includes the songs “Summertime” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So”), even if they don’t know they know it. It’s in the ether.’

“Seeing I was ruffled, the executive said--’OK, I’ll tell you why we want to pass. First off, it’s about black people, which means no white people will go see it. Second, it was written by a white man, which means no black people will go see it. Third, it’s an opera. Which means no one will go see it.’

“It made me very angry,” Nunn says now.

Still, he and his English production partners, Greg Smith and Richard Price, persevered. When Britain’s Royal Opera asked Nunn to reunite the Glyndebourne cast and mount the production in its Covent Garden opera house earlier this year, Nunn was delighted--but asked that the opportunity be used to make some kind of permanent visual record of the production.

Nunn and Smith had already produced “Othello” for the BBC, which now came up with some money for a TV production of “Porgy and Bess.” The U.S. public television series “American Playhouse” and “Great Performances” co-funded (and co-produced) the project with about the same amount of money.

“But it wasn’t easy,” Nunn reflects. “Getting the money was like having your teeth pulled without an anesthetic. The project was on and off like a traffic light. Three times Greg, Richard and I had to admit the likelihood was that it was off.

“The same thing assails all such projects. ‘Porgy and Bess’ is tainted by being a classic. For the most part, you can’t get anything by Shakespeare filmed, unless Ken Branagh does it. We’re concerned here with a masterpiece that can’t be tampered with. It’s sung from start to end. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh can’t get films made of ‘Phantom of the Opera’ and ‘Les Miserables’ because they’re sung through, so it’s no surprise the great music theater work of the 1930s falls into the same category. Supposedly, everyone prefers hit tunes and spoken dialogue.”

To get “Porgy and Bess” made, Greg Smith confirms, the producers had to go chasing around Europe. “Finally,” he said, “we got some money from France, Germany and Portugal. The pieces finally came together.”

So it was that Catfish Row was created within a single soundstage at Shepperton. Smith says the budget for “Porgy and Bess” is “in excess of $4 million. That’s high for TV, but we were determined to make a film as opposed to shooting a performance of an opera on a stage.” “American Playhouse” is likely to air “Porgy and Bess” in the fall.

The cast is 80-strong, and Nunn succeeded in persuading the vast majority of the Glyndebourne cast to reunite--including bass-baritone Willard White and soprano Cynthia Haymon in the title roles.

“When we all did this at Glyndebourne,” recalled White in his dressing room during a shooting break, “there was a certain awe in the company. We knew we had a powerful thing, but we didn’t know how it would go down.” As it was, the formally dressed Glyndebourne audience, usually noted for its restraint, stood and applauded wildly.

“It’s very unusual to be in a company where there is a desire to say, ‘Let’s meet again,’ ” White noted. “But here the social level is strong, the musical level is strong, and, dare I say it, everyone fits in so well.”

For filming, the principals in “Porgy and Bess” lip-sync to their own voices on the cast album, on which they are accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Simon Rattle. White admitted that the repeated takes for filming were difficult. “But without that frustration, you wouldn’t get it done.”

White believes the work has stood the test of time, but acknowledges it has built-in difficulties. “It’s impossible to cast because it’s very difficult to find enough black singers trained to do it. And it can only be sung by black singers. But it’s not an ordinary musical. It requires operatic training.”

So is it an opera or a musical? White smiles a trifle wearily. “Had Gershwin not written musicals, the question would not arise. It’s musical drama which requires operatic skills, so it’s an opera. Had Gershwin not written it to be performed by black people, it would never be referred to as ‘a folk opera.’ No one talks of ‘Peter Grimes’ as a folk opera, or ‘La Boheme,’ or ‘Magic Flute.’ I don’t know what the problem is.”

Nunn thinks one problem is the perception of “Porgy and Bess” as “an old warhorse with a slightly Uncle Tom-ish taint, which didn’t hang together as a narrative.” He has attempted to fix this by removing the disabled Porgy from the goat cart in which he is usually pulled around, and putting him on crutches.”

Nunn regards the central relationship between Porgy and Bess as “more tender, touching and sexually rewarding than anything since Romeo and Juliet. They are in many ways mismatched. Yet they find love.”

“George Gershwin was not a political animal, and nor was Ira. But Du Bose Heyward (on whose story the opera is based) was. He was writing about a community he genuinely loved, about a kind of social injustice and distress, and about how these people were capable of triumphing over their circumstances. They were indomitable.”