Stephen Sondheim has slammed the new version of the show.
The fate of “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” was still up the air yesterday as the production team weighed the risks of opening a show in New York that’s been maligned by two of the most influential people in the American theater — Stephen Sondheim and Times critic Ben Brantley.
Some people on the show are shouting “full speed ahead,” while others are said to be “depressed” about the prospects for success in New York.
The show opened last week at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.
The estates of George and Ira Gershwin, who wrote the score, and DuBose Heyward, who wrote the script, have yet to approve the Broadway transfer, sources say.
Everyone was thrown for a loop by Brantley’s review. While he praised Audra McDonald‘s performance as Bess, he panned director Diane Paulus‘ production and Suzan-Lori Parks‘ new script.
A production source I spoke to last week said: “You’d better rush up to Boston if you want to see the show.”
Brantley broke the once hard-and-fast rule that New York critics don’t review out-of-town tryouts of Broadway-bound shows. He did so because of the firestorm created by Sondheim. The composer publicly excoriated Paulus and Parks for saying that the characters in the opera were “underwritten” and claiming they were going to reinvent this American classic for contemporary audiences.
Another New York critic, Jeremy Gerard of Bloomberg, weighed in over the weekend. He, too, praised McDonald, but called Paulus’ staging “remarkably static,” though he added that the last half hour of the show was “explosive.”
This “Porgy and Bess” mess is indeed a tricky one for the estates, the producers and the investors.
On the one hand, they’ll be ceding too much power to Sondheim and the critics if they scrap the show.
“They’ll do real harm to the title,” says a veteran producer. “If the estates do not approve the Broadway run, they’re basically saying Steve Sondheim is right and the only way to do ‘Porgy and Bess’ is to do the original — a full-length opera.”
Other producers believe the show should come in just to spite the critics.
“OK — it’s not my money — but if they close, they’re giving the critics way too much power,” one says. “And we’ve finally gotten to a point where the critics don’t necessarily have make-or-break power in New York anymore.”
But even if the critics had raved about “Porgy and Bess,” the cold truth is that it would still be a tough sell in the commercial theater.
A production directed by Trevor Nunn in London a few years ago opened to decent reviews and sold about 12 tickets.
And while critics always shower McDonald with valentines, she’s yet to prove her worth at the box office.
She’s appeared on Broadway infrequently, the last time in a middling revival of “110 in the Shade” in 2007.
What was supposed to have been her star vehicle — “Marie Christine” — was a nap-inducer that ran just 42 performances at the Vivian Beaumont in 1999 and 2000.
She was brilliant in the revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” but the star who sold that show was Sean Combs.
My hunch is that, by the end of the week, the producers of “Porgy and Bess” will prove their mettle by announcing the show will open, as scheduled, at the Richard Rodgers in January.
And by June, after “Follies” sweeps the Tonys, “Porgy” investors will be on the phone to their accountants discussing the write-off.