This Day in Cold War History (‘Porgy and Bess’ Staged in Leningrad, at Soviet and US Turning Points)

Dec. 26, 1955—In the first American theater troupe appearance in the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik Revolution, the international touring company of Porgy and Bess performed in Leningrad.

The massive company, nearly 100 strong, presented the 1935 “folk opera” by George and Ira Gershwin amid simultaneous watersheds in U.S. and Soviet history. In America, the civil-rights movement was picking up momentum with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision and the onset of the Montgomery bus boycott. In the U.S.S.R., Nikita Khrushchev, having been named secretary of the Communist Party, was gauging how to expose Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian abuses.

In this atmosphere, the production by the Everyman Opera Company became a vehicle for political controversy, as this work had been since its Broadway premiere 20 years before. Then, it was a matter of domestic dispute: How accurate was its depiction of African-American life? Now, many wondered if the Soviets would use the show to highlight American racial inequality as Marxism competed against the free-enterprise system in the postwar order.

So much intrigue and suspense surrounded the event that it received unusually extensive press coverage, including by CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr and Truman Capote, stepping away from novels, musicals and film scripts to venture into creative nonfiction for The New Yorker Magazine. Capote’s chronicle of the epic trip, The Muses Are Heard, became his first significant step into the genre that he would transform with In Cold Blood.

The all-black cast (insisted on from its Broadway premiere) of the Everyman group had already been touring for four years, including a triumphant stop earlier that year before a demanding Italian audience in Milan's La Scala to perform the theater's first American opera. But the stakes were far higher when Everyman director and co-producer Robert Breen led his company into Russia.

Throughout the international tour, the group had been sponsored by the U.S. State Department. But funding was denied for the Russian leg of the long tour because the State Department felt the Soviets would use this depiction of poverty in Charleston’s Catfish Row in its propaganda war against America.

Instead, funding was handled by the Soviet Ministry of Culture, and as the Everyman group prepared for the show, they anxiously considered whether they were being watched by their hosts and how they should answer incessant questions about the civil-rights struggle going on back at home.

It is hard not to read Capote’s account without admiration for the intelligence, talent and dignity of its African-American cast, each member balancing fidelity to an imperfect country that could easily be embarrassed on the world stage with their commitment to truth and justice.

It is equally difficult to read Capote without rolling one’s eyes at State Department representatives addressing the cast in carefully calibrated terms, at other whites along for the ride (e.g., Ira Gershwin’s wife Lenore on rumors that their hotel rooms would be wired: “Where are we going to gossip? Unless we simply stand in the bathroom and keep flushing…”) and at Capote’s trip through a local department store.

Despite some jitters before and during the performance on how Soviet listeners were reacting (Bess’ adjustment of her garter upset some local prudes), the show moved audiences in Leningrad and, later, Moscow. It paved the way for later productions in Mother Russia of My Fair Lady, The Threepenny Opera, Annie Get Your Gun, Kiss Me, Kate, and Sugar.

Song Lyric of the Day (George and Ira Gershwin, on Incomprehension of the News)

“The more I read the papers
 The less I comprehend
 The world and all its capers
 And how it all will end.”— “Love Is Here To Stay,” lyrics by Ira Gershwin, music by George Gershwin, originally written for the film The Goldwyn Follies (1938), reprinted in Ira Gershwin: Selected Lyrics, edited by Robert Kimball (2009)

Song Lyric of the Day (George and Ira Gershwin, on Dating and "The Economic Situation")

“I’m tired of keeping up with the economic trends

And the universal problems that perplex;

Oh, tell me where I can find a man who condescends

To show an int’rest in sex.”—"The Economic Situation," music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, in Ira Gershwin: Selected Lyrics, edited by Robert Kimball (2009)

For The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, George Gershwin (1998-1937) and brother Ira (1896-1983) had “Miss Gherkin” (a young Eve Arden) and a group of chorus girls lament the terrible impact of hard times on their love lives. It’s not so much that anxiety and overwork lacerate the male libido, but rather that politically active intellectuals now show no interest in them whatsoever. 

I really had to chuckle, though, when I came across this couplet: 

“You’re looking your best, but he hasn’t noticed

For you’re up to your neck in the Taxpayers’ Protest.”

How did the Gershwins anticipate the Tea Party movement of the last decade?

Leave it to the wise, witty and brilliant brothers to make the nation chuckle even during the Great Depression.

This Day in Jazz History (Birth of Ella Fitzgerald, Supreme Artist of the American Songbook)

April 25, 1917-- Ella Fitzgerald, who, as the “Queen of Jazz” sent listeners into transports of joy for half a century, was born in Newport News, Va., in a home already broken, with parents who had separated even before her birth. By the end of her teens, she had experienced even greater trouble, as her mother died and she was sent to a reform school.

Competing in an “Amateur Night” at Harlem’s Apollo Theater broke the dreariness of her life, opened an avenue to a livelihood, and allowed her to surmount her shyness and self-consciousness about her appearance for at least a few hours onstage.

As a youngster raised on rock ‘n’ roll, it took me a while to warm to Fitzgerald. I knew her best from 1970s Memorex commercials, featuring the famous tagline, "Is it live, or is it Memorex?". In the late 1960s, perhaps advised by her management to seek out newer material, she chose to sing on The Ed Sullivan Show a tune not suited to her gifts, The Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love” (though it was a hit in the UK). Even her mastery of scat singing seemed at the time to me more like vocal pyrotechnics for their own sake rather than in the service of the song.

What made me appreciate her for the first time was my discovery two decades ago of her covers of great American songwriters: Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, the Gershwins, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin, and Rodgers and Hart. The series, starting with Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book in 1956 and continuing for nearly a decade, was an extraordinary artistic success that, in the process, earned the deep gratitude of those to whom she paid musical tribute. (A typical response was from Ira Gershwin: “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.")

Like her admirer Frank Sinatra, Fitzgerald had already been a success for more than a decade, but may have achieved her greatest artistic heights in the 1950s with work that helped establish the canon of the Great American Songbook. Jazz critic-historian Gary Giddins may have summed up why she retained the loyalty of jazz fans for five decades: 

“When Ella Fitzgerald was singing at her peak – in good voice, with good song, arrangement and accompaniment – nothing in life was more resplendent.”

Song Lyric of the Day (Ira Gershwin, Showing How to Recall Russian Composers)

“There's Malichevsky, Rubinstein, Arensky and Tchaikovsky,

Sapelnikoff, Dimitrieff, Tscherepnin, Kryjanowsky…”—“Tchaikovsky (and Other Russians),” from the musical Lady in the Dark, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, music by Kurt Weill, book and direction by Moss Hart (1941)

I could go on and on like this. But aside from copyright restrictions, a little bit of this goes a long way—or, as the intro to the song goes, it’s enough to “give me brain concussion.”

Now imagine this, but instead of just eight tongue-twisting Russian names, you have more than 50—and sung in less than 40 seconds!

That was the frightening technical challenge facing Danny Kaye (pictured) in Lady in the Dark, which premiered at Broadway’s Alvin Theatre 75 years ago today. The star of the show, Gertrude Lawrence, had her own second-act showstopper in “The Saga of Jenny,” but Kaye, a supporting player, came close to upstaging her with this number.

I had always thought that “Getting Married Today,” the Stephen Sondheim number from Company, sung by a bride-to-be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, was the most astonishingly fast song I had ever heard until I got a load of this. The task facing Kaye may have been greater because those words had at least three, often four, syllables, often with an "s." Now, multiple that in a compressed time frame when you barely have time to catch your breath, and you’ll have an idea of what was involved.

(If you still can’t imagine this, then listen to this YouTube clip of Kaye reenacting the number for radio some years later.)

Lady in the Dark would have been an event to remember in any case. It marked Ira Gershwin’s return to Broadway for the first time since his brother George had passed away tragically from a brain tumor four years before. It starred Lawrence, a transatlantic star of the stage. And, in depicting a magazine editor’s monologues to her psychotherapist as songs, playwright-director Moss Hart helped musical theater take further advances along the road paved by Show Boat and Pal Joey.

But the presence of Kaye was something else entirely. His performance helped get him discovered by the wife of producer Samuel Goldwyn, who soon brought him out to Hollywood and got him under contract. Though he appeared on TV in later years, and even returned to Broadway in the 1970 Richard Rodgers musical Two by Two, it is through the cinema, in the likes of White Christmas, The Court Jester, and Hans Christian Andersen (scripted by Hart), for which he is best known today.

I may well have come across the star in a rather unusual setting. In the mid-1970s, I was with my brother and a friend on a road trip to New England when our car pulled right behind a limo slowing down at a Connecticut toll plaza. “Look!” my friend said, pointing to the vanity license plate of the limo. It read DANNY K.

Song Lyrics of the Day (Ira and George Gershwin)

“Love is sweeping the country!
Waves are hugging the shore;
All the sexes
From Maine to Texas
Have never known such love before.”—“Love Is Sweeping the Country,” from Of Thee I Sing, book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, music by George Gershwin)

(The citation above corrects a slight error in the headline—George Gershwin did not, of course, write the lyrics to this musical, but I’ve decided to redress the wrong done him by the Pulitzer Prize committee when they awarded his collaborators the Pulitzer Prize but not him. To their way of thinking, only the words counted. Well, it wasn’t the first time that the board made a mistake, and it surely won’t be the last.

Opening on Broadway in 1931, Of Thee I Sing was the first musical comedy ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Several years ago, I hunted down, at the Paley Center for Media in New York, a 1972 TV version of the show, featuring, among others, Carroll O’Connor, Cloris Leachman, Jack Gilford, Ted Knight, and David Doyle. The show was broadcast on CBS, and when you look at the actors and consider their backgrounds, the most obvious qualification of many of them was that they were stars of then-popular series on the “Tiffany Network.” Of all the actors, the one who came off the best was Michele Lee—not surprisingly, as she had achieved fame on Broadway in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Amazingly, no movie has ever been made of this landmark musical—the Marx Brothers toyed with the idea, only to go with another script, Duck Soup. So the CBS show, for better or worse, is what we have to put up with. I can’t wait until I have the chance to see another version of this musical.

For years, the most relevant part of the show was the character of Alexander Throttlebottom, whose name became synonymous with Vice-Presidents who do nothing but attend funerals in the name of the President. That hasn’t been as much the case since Jimmy Carter made Walter Mondale a significant player in his administration. Over the last decade, however, a more surprising point of similarity was noticed: the President in the musical, John P. Wintergreen, who won the election on a platform of “love,” is sued by a young Southern lady, triggering the threat of impeachment proceedings.

This week, as the Democrats gather in Denver—and later, when the Republicans convene in St. Paul--it’s not a bad idea to remember the acid truths of the Kaufman-Ryskind-Gershwin musical, which showed, in the midst of the darkness of the Great Depression, that chuckling about politics can be as healthy for the battered American psyche as singing.)