Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

244 Chapter 9 The American Musical Theatre
The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess is the new title of this 2012 musical theatre revision (by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks
and director Diane Paulus) of George and Ira Gershwin’s 1935 American opera, set in Charleston, South Carolina, in the
1930s. Audra McDonald, in red, is Bess, with her friends on Charleston’s fictitious “Catfish Row.” The production won
the Best Revival of a Musical Tony Award for the year, and McDonald received the Tony for Best Performance by an
Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical. © Sara Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux
significantly on race relations in America. The famous
“Ol’ Man River” referred pointedly to the then-current
racial divisions as sung by a black actor in front of the
show’s (largely white) 1927 audience:
Colored folks work on de Mississippi,
Colored folks work while de white folks play,
Pullin’ dem boats from de dawn to sunset,
Gittin’ no rest till de Judgment Day—
Don’ look up
An’ don’ look down—
You don’ dast make
De white boss frown.
Bend your knees
An’ bow your head,
An’ pull dat rope
Until yo’ dead.*
*Lyrics to “Ol’ Man River” from Show Boat, 1927, Jerome
Kern & Oscar Hammerstein. Copyright 1927 by PolyGram
International Publishing, Inc. Copyright renewed. Reprinted by
permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
Meanwhile, the Gershwin brothers’ Strike Up the
Band and Of Thee I Sing moved this fraternal team into
the arena of political satire and proved so successful that
the latter production received the 1932 Pulitzer Prize—
the first musical to do so. The Gershwins followed
with the semi-opera Porgy and Bess (1935), which
remains a staple of both international opera companies
and American theatres today and was revived to great
acclaim on Broadway in 2012.
The second serious phase of the musical’s golden age
came into full flower with Rodgers and Hart’s startling
Pal Joey (1940), adapted from grimly ironic and sophisticated
New Yorker stories by John O’Hara and featuring
an amoral gigolo and his often unsavory companions in
a musical pastiche of the contemporary urban nightclub
scene. Tame by today’s standards, Joey shocked prewar
audiences with its suggestive lyrics about sexual infidelity
and shady business ethics and with a show-stopping
song (“Zip!”) belted out by a stripper who sang out her
thoughts while doing her act.