The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess Blu-ray Movie Review

The listenin' may not always be easy, but it's worthwhile.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 4, 2014

George and Ira Gershwin (whose collective surname has evidently been trademarked, incredibly) wrote a lot of great musicals. Porgy and Bess is not one of them. Before my personal battlements are stormed, let me clarify. The Gershwins ® (who knows how litigious the rights holders might be?) had a number of high profile Broadway hits throughout the 1920s and 1930s, creating such legendary successes as Oh, Kay!, Strike Up the Band, Funny Face, Show Girl, Girl Crazy and the Pulitzer Prize winning Of Thee I Sing (in one of the vagaries of how the Prize was awarded, only Ira was fêted). Pardon My English and Of Thee I Sing’s sequel Let ‘Em Eat Cake immediately preceded The Gershwins’ ® (sorry, I couldn’t resist) Porgy and Bess, but aside from its proximity in the brothers’ chronology of shows, there’s little to link it to their previous works. George had been searching for a new musical vernacular for years, having written Rhapsody in Blue circa 1924 (though it’s notable—no pun intended—that the piece was orchestrated by Ferde Grofé of Grand Canyon Suite fame), and ultimately moving to Paris for a while shortly thereafter where he sought to study with some famous composers and teachers, none of whom agreed to take him on, not wanting to meddle with his very distinctive, jazz inflected compositional style. But it had been obvious for years that George was simply not fully satisfied with “pop song” writing, even if his accomplishments in that idiom are incredibly brilliant, harmonically sophisticated outings (Gershwin’s use of altered dominant seventh chords—something helped by his almost insanely huge hands, which allowed for unusual voicings—are a defining feature of all of his writing). Porgy and Bess was George’s announcement to the theater community that “mere” musicals were not enough anymore. And that is why Porgy and Bess is not a great musical—it’s a great, if admittedly sometimes problematic, opera. This distinction has been complicated not only by the Gershwins’ ® own reputation for being popular song writers, something exacerbated by the fact that several tunes extracted from Porgy and Bess became sizable standalone hits (and in the case of “Summertime”, an evergreen standard), but also with how this ostensible “opera” has been staged through the years.

Porgy and Bess may have been a partial succès d’estime when it premiered in 1935, but it still confounded a lot of critics and it absolutely bombed at the box office, sending Gershwin into something of a tailspin, even if he licked his wounds in the luxe confines of Hollywood, making a lot of money churning out songs for films, sadly for not very long before he expired from a brain tumor. But Porgy and Bess’ reputation was already so bifurcated that no one really knew how to mount a revival. The piece simply didn’t seem to fit snugly within preconceived notions of what a traditional musical or in fact an opera should be. Cheryl Crawford, a rather iconoclastic Broadway producer, though she had solved this supposed “problem” by making Porgy and Bess into more of a book musical, with discrete musical numbers, for a 1942 revival she brought to the Great White Way. Otto Preminger’s 1959 filming of the piece never seemed to really know how to properly address the operatic elements (the Gershwins’ ® estate was not at all satisfied with the film, one reason it has largely disappeared from sight, including on home video).

Still, Porgy and Bess never seemed to quite succeed on either its own, or its redacted, terms, and once a certain politically correct consciousness started to take hold during the burgeoning Civil Rights Era, the piece was rightly or wrongly perceived to be promoting certain objectionable stereotypes in the African American community, something that was perhaps exacerbated by Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward’s use of patois. As incredible as it may sound, it really wasn’t until the mid-seventies that Porgy and Bess really was finally accepted in its original form.

That now iconic Houston Grand Opera revival was shepherded by David Gockley, who serves as Executive Producer of this large and brilliantly sung 2009 San Francisco Opera production. Gockley deserves much more recognition in the annals of American music for having had the foresight to realize what a treasure the original Porgy and Bess was. Luckily the Houston Grand Opera version opened a lot of peoples’ eyes to the glories of this challenging and deliberately anachronistic piece, and whatever inspired Gockley back in the day has certainly continued to inform this lavish but still gritty interpretation of the story of the crippled Porgy (Eric Owens), Bess (Laquita Mitchell), Sportin’ Life (Chauncey Packer) and Crown (Lester Lynch). This is a surprisingly prescient piece of writing from a purely non-musical standpoint, with hardscrabble characters caught up in the precipitous decline that poverty can create.

A lot of people think they know Porgy and Bess, based on “Summertime” or “It Ain’t Necessarily So” or “There’s a Boat That’s Leavin’ Soon for New York”, but Porgy and Bess is much more than a compilation of fantastic set pieces. Gershwin’s music runs the gamut from traditional 32 bar AABA format to more pure recitative to much more modern techniques like dodecaphony. There’s a certain wildness to the complete Porgy and Bess that rather nicely mirrors the emotion tumult of the main characters. This isn’t “polite” opera, delicately portraying the cultured manners of a ruling elite. This is much more in line with the tempestuous Romantic pieces of Puccini or Verdi capturing the roiling emotional lives of everyday people, albeit in the American South. The powers that be may have trademarked the Gershwins’ ® name, but there’s no way to adequately trademark the genius that is on display in Porgy and Bess. Luckily, this San Francisco Opera production is fully up to the task of bringing it all to messy, unpredictable life.

The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Porgy and Bess is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of EuroArts with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 1.78:1. The Catfish Row scenes tend to be cast mostly in browns and beiges, something that might deprive the image of at least a bit of pop. The Kittiwah Island sequence is marginally more colorful, with a nice purplish scrim upstage and some nice yellows and bone whites in the costumes. The image here is very clear and well defined, though there are some occasional issues with shadow detail toward the wings of the large stage. Contrast is generally very strong, however, making the transitions between dimly lit and brightly lit scenes look clear and detailed.

The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Porgy and Bess features DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and LPCM 2.0 mixes, both of which have excellent fidelity. There's just a touch of some odd quasi-phasing in the 5.1 mix when the audience applauds. The 5.1 mix also just occasionally tends to bury the singers beneath the orchestral masses, especially those who are on the balcony of the huge Catfish Row set. These niggling concerns aside, though, the 5.1 mix sounds great, with Mitchell's clear, piercing soprano never sounding brittle or over bright, and Owens' deep penetrating bass-baritone shoring up the lower registers. The orchestra is well conducted by John DeMain, who looks absolutely delighted to be leading "the band". Fidelity is excellent and dynamic range is extremely wide.

The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Meet the Artists (1080i; 8:09) features interviews with the principal cast.


• Meet the Director: Francesca Zambello (1080i; 3:42). This is Zambello's sixth time helming a production of Porgy and Bess, and she discusses what the piece means to her.


• Meet the Conductor: John DeMain (1080i; 6:06). DeMain discusses Porgy and Bess' place in American music as well as opera in general.


• Reflections from General Director David Gockley (1080i; 10:37). Gockley talks about Nina Simone's version of "I Loves You, Porgy", which attracted his interest as a young boy, an interest which continued through his college and early professional lives, culminating in his central role in reviving the original, uncut version in the mid-seventies.

The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Porgy and Bess continues to exist simultaneously in the worlds of musical theater and opera. As recently as 2011, another stab at "muscalizing" the property made it to Broadway with Audra McDonald as Bess, and even though the project was actually sparked by the Gershwin and Heyward estates, it met with pretty diverse critical reaction, with none other than Stephen Sondheim not being especially pleased with how tweaked this version was. Even those without a particular fondness for opera really should try to experience the original version of Porgy and Bess at least once, and there's no better way than in this handsomely mounted and impeccably sung production. Highly recommended.