Leontyne Price as Bess, Cab Calloway as Sportin' Life

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zqW9ysmU-M

Talk about an extraordinary document: Porgy and Bess done in Berlin in 1952 with William Warfield as Porgy, LEONTYNE PRICE AS BESS, and CAB FUCKING CALLOWAY AS SPORTIN' LIFE!!! In the pit was the conductor of the premiere.

For as long as our current zeitgeist goes, wars over Porgy and Bess will continue to be fought. The pre-eminent voice in the wars on this work used to be the snobs complaining opera was polluted with American popular music. Now the work is declared war upon by people in the intersectional crowd who claims that Porgy is akin to minstrelsy.

I suppose to people who insist on reading things literally and banishing any trope that even resembles objectionable content, yes, Porgy probably seems like minstrelsy. But oh my god, it resembles minstrelsy because it's the fucking opposite.

The whole way in which dehumanized people become looked at with sympathy, empathy, and humanity, is by taking familiar tropes of depiction and turning them on their heads. The whole point of Porgy and Bess is that these people onstage are so much more human and dignified than they might seem at first glance, and if people in the audience assume that people like these characters are less than three dimensional and human, they have to examine whether their attitude is racist.

This is literally how human connection is made from Shakespeare onward. There's no moment of mimesis if we do not see the caricatures inherent in Shylock, Othello, and Richard III, and then observe how circumstances make them so, and in spite of their circumstances, retain a full measure of their depth of human character. Think of Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, who became suicidal women shunned by society for having affairs because that was the only happiness available to them. Think of the tragic fate of the Karamazov family, and how their fates were written for them through their experience of a deadbeat abusive father.

The whole point of Porgy and Bess is that these people are put upon by the forces of American life, white American life, which deliberately humiliates people of color, and still, in spite of their hopelessly colossal suffering, they heroically persist in taking their full enjoyment of life. When Serena sings "My Man's Gone Now," how many millions in African-American women could have sung this song? This is how minds are changed. This is how people are allowed to rise up. This, so much more than another earnest theater piece about social ills, is how social change is made.