The response that engaged most closely with the work’s dramaturgical difficulties (and here you may want to glance back through my article) was “How to make Act 2 work?” Yes—apart from the ending itself, that’s the make-or-break question about putting Porgy across. As I noted in my article, this was made doubly difficult at the Met owing to the elimination of the intermission after Act 1, then plugging all the way through to the end of the act. (A two-act version plays somewhat better if the intermission comes before, not after, the scene on Kittiwah. The act thus ends with the reprise of Porgy’s “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin,” as Bess heads off to the picnic, and intermission comes some 15-20 minutes sooner.) But even with the specified breaks, the act is still a problem, not only because of its sheer length, but because of its structure. It’s through-composed in the sense that everything’s sung (always with the exception of the white folk’s lines), but not in the sense of continuous musical development. While nearly all its numbers are effective in and of themselves, it sprawls, its pacing is erratic, the placing of some of the songs can seem arbitrary, and it tends to slip in and out of dramatic focus.

So let me pretend for a moment that we’re going to try to lessen these problems, and that we’re going to do this in the context of what I see as Porgy‘s essential nature, as a work of American realistic music theatre—American verismo, if you will.^(I) This means that we are going to seek an ongoing illusion of lifelikeness, the sorts of characters and events to which we can say, “Yes—it would happen just like that,” even though most of this life is sung. It also means that in our choices of what to include and what to cut, and of where (if anywhere) to think of disobeying the creators’ wishes, these choices must always seek to reinforce the central characters and their story line, if necessary at the expense of more incidental characters and happenings. It goes without saying (I hope) that all this is secondary to the quality of performance. Great singingacting is what will make the show go; direction, design, and musical leadership must first of all be in support of that, and cannot compensate for its absence—as with any opera. Our show must be housed in a largish playhouse, but one at least a third smaller than the Met, with a healthy stage-to-auditorium ratio, and with an orchestra and chorus that keeps the full distribution but cuts back somewhat on sheer numbers from the forces heard at the Met. Dialogue must play easily, and principal characters must stand out in the complex ensemble scenes.