‘Porgy and Bess’ With a White Cast Stirs Controversy

This is an opera ABOUT BLACK AMERICANS. What white people want is the unrestricted "right" to steal everything from everyone. Any objection to white theft is "racist". The Gershwins put the Black cast stipulation in because they understood all too well the natural proclivity of whites to exclude non whites from any positive endeavor. They didn't want this opera to be turned into a minstrel show or white washed for the comfort of whites. Jazz is Black music. The Blues is Black music. The creation of Bebop style Jazz was a deliberate attempt by Black musicians to shake their white imitators/exploiters. As the great Abbey Lincoln said "they (whites) will steal your ancestors if you let them." The "reverse racism" "all lives matter" comments bear her out all too well.

And if a musical was to be created and its creator specified that it was to be ONLY performed by an all WHITE cast this would pass muster with you? Having seen many depictions of a blond blue-eyed Jesus, a black Jesus, etc. I would just propose that artistic license allows for creativity. Sorry if it doesn't pass your litmus PC test.

So this "stirs controversy," but an all-black "Hamilton" cast and nobody bats an eye? Typical Liberal hypocrisy.

An all-white Porgy and Bess? Pretty stupid but no more so than an all-black Hello, Dolly! which was staged on Broadway at one point.

Some questions. Did they sing in English ( dialect in this case) or Hungarian? Did they use subtitles? Either way did they change the text to represent the "refugees in the hangar"? Hungarians who know English must have gotten rather confused as to what was going on in the story. I remember a performance of Threepenny Opera (transplanted to Depression-era New York) where the girl playing Polly got flustered at one point and reverted to the "London" text she had originally learned -- and of course the whole thing was really supposed to be Weimar Germany in disguise. Talk about confusion. It was fun, though.

I’m surprised at the number of commenters who claim this is reverse racism. Disadvantaging the predominant, privileged class can not be, by definition, racism. It is simply a gesture meant to try to level a long-slanted playing field. It means some individual white people may “suffer” as people of color enjoy a few more opportunities. When taken on the whole, though, it does not really make the predominant culture suffer...although I understand it may not seem that way to, say, the applicant to a law school who lost admission in favor of a similarly qualified black applicant. In the meantime, artistic considerations are different from racist ones. Perhaps rethinking P & B as about other desperately disadvantaged people and casting it with white people makes sense.

I remind everyone of Rigoletto, the Metropolitan Opera House all dressed up as Las Vegas, 1960. Neon lights. Did that make any sense? The Met wants to cultivate future audiences. We need that. I still cried at the end.

Too bad that the whole article is about the casting controversy, not about the performance itself. There's no indication that Ms. Ivanoff attended the premiere, and no hint of what it was actually like. Even the quoted audience member speaks of the past, not the present.

I've seen several performances of G & S Mikado which is in the public domain. Many seek traditional, Doyly Ocart for instance. Other performances (like the one from Austraila that's on utube) are staged differently, characters recasted and adapted to different time periods. I find these new versions add an extra kick to the operetta while maintaining deference to originators. We're in a whole new world. P & B is more serious I don't see a problem deviating on performers skin color, as long as people understand the background and what it means, what it's like, to live on Catfish row. The Audience should be able to pick up on a lot of that from the performance. They have subtitles. The opera house in Budapest is exquisite.

As a music and theatre critic, I have little patience with producers who ignore or flatly contradict the intent of a work's creators. If the Hungarian State Opera wants to re-stage a classic in a way that emphasizes immigration issues, there are probably better options out there; "Nabucco" comes to mind, for one. To me, this just looks like a gimmick.

You may want to bold the sentence stating the Gershwin estates stipulate the opera be performed only by black casts to ward off the Trump supporters who will come here and complain about "racist blacks."

Porgy and Bess is one of the greatest operatic masterpieces of all time, and is performed all too infrequently. If the reason is difficulty in find sufficient numbers of qualified black performers, just do it with the best performers available. It's for the music-screw the politics!

guess what? any art can be performed by anyone in any way. that's what freedom of expression is. learn it well.

Trying to imagine the reaction if Wagner stipulated his operas could only be performed by Whites.

Porgy and Bess with a white cast makes no sense to me. Let me tell you that P & B is my favorite American Opera, among many others and definitely in my top ten of all operas. There is a push on for color blind casting and this is one end result, it becomes impossible to say no this should not be if its proper to cast minorities in roles imagined for whites. My thought as a theater and opera professional is that maybe, just maybe we should think "does this make any sense at all" before engaging in color blind casting. Some pieces will work fine when cast without regard to the race and/or ethnicity of its cast and some will not. Examples :A mixed race cast for The Little Foxes is going to work against the piece wherein racism is a prominent theme, yet a mixed race cast is required for Miss Saigon especially in the principal roles. Les Miz has worked well with mixed casting, so has Phantom. The original production of Hello Dolly got a huge shot in the arm when an all black cast was brought in, partially because that cast was headed by the sublime Pearl Bailey who in my mind was one of the finest Dollys ever. Porgy and Bess is about the way blacks were treated in the time and place it is set and then contrasts the reality of the honest emotions these characters feel and the supposed lack of same that the few white characters impose on them. Just makes no sense to me, especially when looking at the photo.

Do they have any black performers in Hungary?

Translations of time and place can add to the power of a work of art, but... an airplane hangar??? Given the original setting of "Porgy and Bess," wouldn't a group of Roma struggling to deal with being confined to a Hungarian slum have been a better "translation"? Of course that might have hit a bit too close to home.

This is a non-issue. What about Hamilton? This ought to be a source of pride for everyone. Only chip-on-the-shoulder racists would be upset about this. The "anti-cultural appropriation" movement is as racist and negative an influence on society as the alt-right folks are.

It's a shame that the opera isn't performed very often, and the story is not given interpretation, because of an essentially racist demand by the Gershwin estate. Restricting it to black only is as racist as restricting to whites only. In either case, it does more harm than good.

Europeans’ take on opera has always been wacky. There was a Marriage of Figaro that takes place in a modern supermarket and a version of La Bohème done on the moon. I have also seen a performance of My Fair Lady done with guys in S&M costume. This is just another take on using music in a different way.

I'd think it could have made sense to translate the opera into one about the Roma in eastern Europe. Casting this as all-white makes about as much sense as an all-white Hairspray or Ragtime or Showboat. Or flippng it and having Rolf in The Sound of Music be black. The good music and story will transcend, but something has been lost for sure.

I read in Opera News years ago that the "only-blacks" clause is often disregarded abroad, simply because many countries do not have enough black actors available to cover all the parts. It's not that the Hungarian Opera is doing something new, but that they are being more blatant about it.

In 2016 I did a river cruise of the Danube which included Hungary. Lovely country. Nice people. All white. If Europeans can play basketball, and Asians do rap, let the Hungarians perform my favorite opera. Note: If not for Asian musicians, Jazz would be in trouble.

The article is incorrect about the wishes of the Gershwin Estate. The Estate says, when performed in the US, Porgy and Bess must include an all-black cast. When performed outside the US, it may have cast members of any color. This makes sense in that other countries may not have enough black citizens and singers to fill the cast. This opera must have been performed with the full blessing of the Gershwin Estate. While I understand, from an American lens, this particular take on the opera looks ridiculous, from the Hungarian point-of-view, the world of Catfish Row has no resonance.

Opera as an art form is dead if our best performers are not allowed, even encouraged, to perform its best works, regardless of skin color. Are we to believe James Earl Jones is not an appropriate Hamlet ? Seriously....

The article offers no context as to how many black people live in Hungary and a 30-minute search provided no data regarding this question. At any rate, the number is extremely low. I work in the theatre and know of but one black actor in the whole theatre business, a few Middle Eastern performers with dark skin and of course some Roma actors. It would be impossible to cast an opera with an all-black cast. The issue is very exciting and complex in all countries, but you can't possibly ignore the fact that some requirements are impossible in some parts of the world. So a creative and productive discussion would be about how the opera might translate into a Hungarian cast.

White guys write a musical about black people and now people are complaining that someone performed it with white singers in a country where black singers are in really short supply. Holy Hamilton.

Translation and distance (in time and place) inevitably transform art, but good art in good translation is still worth the effort and the attention. The Hungarian State Opera should be lauded for their effort.

It may be wondered whether the Gershwins ever imagined the piece being performed in Eastern Europe. It may also be wondered whether the density of professional-quality black singers available in Hungary is sufficient to cast a production. Much of the power of the piece derives from the way that its characters -- members of an oppressed minority -- respond emotionally to the daily reality of their situations. in the U.S., it would be nonsensical to make the story about anything except black Americans living in the Jim Crow south. That context retains its resonance to an American audience. But to a Hungarian audience, the resonance would likely be far weaker, if encapsulated in another country a long time ago. Refugees trapped in an Eastern European transit point could hit home much more strongly to a 2018 Hungarian audience. As the article points out, the production's casting decisions are problematic, given the creators' intentions, but a rational case can be made for the production. Of course, some awkwardness in details may ensue --"a boat that's leaving soon for New York" from a Budapest airport? But I suppose that's no crazier than a a Boston setting for Un Ballo in Maschera.

Lots of slippery positions here. DId Tams-Witmark agree to this production without the stipulation, even when it was made aware of the casting? If this production was intended to be a significant re-casting/transposing of context to represent the contemporary migrant crisis, was Tams-Witmark informed, or not? If this is not a licensed production, then Tams-Witmark is not doing its job of representing the interests of its client. If this is a licensed production, despite this new approach (no matter how superb the performance itself might be), then the family who now own and profit from the Gershwin rights have in effect agreed to it, in violation of the very clear vision of the Gershwin brothers and Dubose Heyward (whose libretto and lyrics are significant elements). The long history of conflict and complexity which began in 1935 around productions of "Porgy and Bess" -- these days known as "The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess" for copyright and $ reasons -- continues into the present moment.