Excerpts:
- "There has long been a tension between the manner in which Porgy and Bess, written by George Gershwin and first performed in 1935, has been lauded by audiences in Europe even as it was loathed at home. ...
"Those who have been in its cast read like a who's who of African-Americans prominent in the arts. As well as Angelou, performers have included, at one time or another, Cab Calloway, Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge and Sammy Davis Jr. The songs written for it, particularly Summertime and It Ain't Necessarily So, remain enormously popular.
And yet, in the US, Porgy and Bess has long been steeped in controversy. To many African-Americans, it was little more than a high-class minstrel show - a distant cousin to Amos and Andy. "The times are here to debunk Gershwin's lampblack Negroisms," said Duke Ellington after its premiere." - "But while the racial values that underpinned the play never endured, the music Gershwin created only grew in its appeal - particularly Summertime and It Ain't Necessarily So. Just as the compelling narrative of Oliver Twist enabled the novel and play to persist beyond any general acceptance of the anti-semitic portrayal of Fagin, so by the 1980s African-Americans had started to believe that they could rescue the play from the anthropological cul-de-sac in which it had been parked."
- "Time has enabled many to understand Porgy and Bess as a period piece, rather than a reflection of commonly held contemporary views. Grace Bumbry, who was born the year Gershwin died and played Bess at the Metropolitan in 1985, said: "I thought it beneath me, I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come too far to have to retrogress to 1935. My way of dealing with it was to see that it was really a piece of Americana, of American history, whether we liked it or not. Whether I sing it or not, it was still going to be there."
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