Porgy & Bess, The Musical

Fans will want to take note of a controversy brewing which looks to eclipse August Wilson versus Robert Brustein in scope and stature over the direction of American theater. Stephen Sondheim has thrown down the gauntlet in a scathing letter to the New York Times for Diane Paulus's reworking of Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess into a Broadway musical. While Messrs. Wilson and Brustein argued over matters of race and artistic expression, Sondheim contra Paulus is more about artistic license and that ultimate cultural arbiter, money. Curiously, in both situations they involve the artistic directors - Brustein and Paulus, his successor - of the American Repertory Theatre.

It's seems that Ms. Paulus, with the connivance of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and 4-time Tony Award-winner singer Audra McDonald - wants to flesh-out the backstories of P & B characters and create new plotlines, including a happy ending, to make the classic more accessible to today's audiences. To this extent, she got the buy-in of the Gershwin estate, doubtless looking toward the pot of gold that all these creative facilitators seek at the end of the rainbow. Mr. Sondheim, who is seeing a landscape change, possibly affecting his own legacy, does not so much question the independence of the artists to create their own vision as he does their frank use - misappropriation would be a better term - of a unique work of art for their own purposes, namely fame and fortune. Ms. Paulus's rocky tenure at ART was featured in a lengthy piece in the current issue of American Theatre magazine. Surely, someone is asleep at the wheel at both the Gershwin estate and ART, and both should take steps to rectify the matter before it turns into a fiasco.

Still, this issue raises several others. The bowdlerization of the text, where troublesome areas are modified and others lost in translation, amounts to censorship. Where do we draw the line? Or better, who stands for the artist when it comes to integrity? The artistic transfer between a nonprofit and commercial enterprise, looks a little bit like technology transfer, between, say a government agency and the private sector. Who stands for the public's (i.e., audience's) interest when there's money on the table - big money?

This subversion of cultural values is an incremental process. (Certainly Ms. Paulus didn't take the first step down this slippery slope - others have and continue to make their comprising way down that path - but they usually waited a few centuries or millennia before improving a work.) It starts with a need to increase revenue and the courting of a sympathetic partnership with a controlling organization or interest. We've seen this when the Barnes Foundation called on elected officials in Pennsylvania and special interests to transfer control of the priceless art collection. It stands revealed when the questions of "whether it's legal" trump those of "whether it's right," and the meaning of words start to lose their importance. It's time to call a thing like it is. If Ms. Paulus and her backers want to mount a new version of Porgy and Bess, it should come with the subtitle: "It Ain't Necessarily So."