"On My Way"
The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and Porgy and Bess
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A revelatory history of the operatic masterpiece that both made and destroyed Rouben Mamoulian, its director and unsung hero.
"Bring my goat!" Porgy exclaims in the final scene of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess. Bess, whom he loves, has left for New York City, and he’s determined to find her. When his request is met with astonishment—New York is a great distance from South Carolina’s Catfish Row—Porgy remains undaunted. He mounts his goat-cart and leads the community in an ecstatic finale, "Oh Lawd, I’m on my way."
Stephen Sondheim has called "Bring my goat!" "one of the most moving moments in musical theater history." For years it was assumed that DuBose Heyward—the author of the seminal novella and subsequent play, Porgy, and later the librettist for the opera Porgy and Bess—penned this historic line. In fact, both it and "Oh Lawd, I'm on my way" were added to the play eight years earlier by that production’s unheralded architect: Rouben Mamoulian. Porgy and Bess as we know it would not exist without the contributions of this master director.
Culling new information from the recently opened Mamoulian Archives at the Library of Congress, award-winning author Joseph Horowitz shows that, more than anyone else, Mamoulian took Heyward's vignette of a regional African-American subculture and transformed it into an epic theater work, a universal parable of suffering and redemption. Part biography, part revelatory history, "On My Way" re-creates Mamoulian's visionary style on stage and screen, his collaboration with George Gershwin, and the genesis of the opera that changed the face of American musical life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Porgy and Bess remains one of the most beloved pieces of American musical theater, and it secured George Gershwin's artistic reputation when it appeared on Broadway shortly before his death at the early age of 38. Drawing on newly available material from the Mamoulian Archives at the Library of Congress, acclaimed music critic and historian Horowitz (Classical Music in America) shows that Gershwin did not write many of the most familiar scenes of the opera; they were instead written by Armenian emigrant Rouben Mamoulian, who in 1927 directed Porgy as his first Theatre Guild production. Horowitz points out that Mamoulian's "fixation on sound and rhythm guided his aesthetic... he insisted that art be constructive, uplifting." Mamoulian alters the picnic and hurricane scenes in the play, and he adds the famous ending the "bring my goat" scene in which Porgy leaves to go after Bess. In masterful, well-paced storytelling, Horowitz narrates Mamoulian's transformation of Gershwin's musical and DuBose Heyward's novel, Mamoulian's rise to fame and success from his early days, Mamoulian's collaboration with Gershwin, and the unfulfilled promise of both Gershwin (because of his early death) and Mamoulian whose attempts to make film versions of Porgy and Bess and Carmen eventually failed. Three appendices provide, among other materials, a synopsis of Porgy and Bess and four versions of the story's end: from Heyward's novel, from the published script of Porgy, from Mamoulian's amendments to the script, and from the opera. Horowitz's elegant sketch offers an illuminating glimpse into a corner of American music history. Elizabeth Kaplan, the Elizabeth Kaplan Agency.
