Review by Choice Review
Award-winning music critic Joseph Horowitz has a substantial list of publications to his credit, including Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America's Fin de Siecle (CH, Dec'12, 50-1976). In this new work he examines Porgy and Bess--the DuBose Heyward play and the Gershwin opera, both of which Mamoulian directed. He holds that Mamoulian has received insufficient recognition for his role in their creation and seeks to redress that wrong. By close examination of texts (examples are given in an appendix), Horowitz is able to reveal additions by Mamoulian as well as his overall contributions to their staging. He demonstrates as well what Mamoulian had planned for the film of the opera (he was fired before he could start). Horowitz gives a good summary of Mamoulian's career, as both film and stage director. Here his account parallels and complements Mark Spergel's Reinventing Reality: The Art and Life of Rouben Mamoulian (1993). Both authors note Mamoulian's temperament was a possible factor in cutting lamentably short his work on film and stage. Endnotes serve as a bibliography, and a section of photographs enhances the text. Summing Up: Recommended. Large academic libraries serving upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals, particularly in performing arts and Gershwin collections. R. D. Johnson emeritus, SUNY College at Oneonta
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The tremendously uplifting finale of Porgy and Bess the crippled hero turns his goat-cart toward New York to find his Bess mirrors neither the novella nor the published play. Rather, Rouben Mamoulian, director of Porgy's original production, added it to accommodate his own musical and balletic styling of the piece. Since he also directed the premier of Gershwin's opera 10 years later, his ending stayed, along with the rest of his conception. It's fitting, then, that Mamoulian gets the limelight in Horowitz's account of the Great American Opera. At 28, Mamoulian came to Porgy from a few years of rapidly mounting success as a director who, against the rising tide of Stanislavskian naturalism, pursued a stylized merging of movement, speech, design, and sound to achieve Wagner's goal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of theatrical art, better than Wagner had. Furthermore, Mamoulian wasn't afraid of entertaining. But his kind of show was expensive, and besides the two incarnations of Porgy, he realized his dream-show only once more, in the 1932 film Love Me Tonight, not infrequently called the best movie musical ever made. The meat of this book lies in Horowitz's analyses of Mamoulian's three masterpieces, which may make theater and movie mavens break out in grateful goosebumps. Musical-theater book of the year? Mmmmm could be!--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A veteran music critic and historian excavates the long-buried story of the signal contributions made to the original staged production of Porgy and Bess by director Rouben Mamoulian (18971987). Horowitz (Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from American's Fin de Sicle, 2012, etc.) has more than one entree on his narrative plate. Throughout, he reminds us of the condescension that many in "high" music culture displayed toward Gershwin, and he reprints a number of comments from reviews of Porgy and Bess (and of other Gershwin works) that demonstrate a reluctance to take him seriously. Gershwin's story is prominent, but the author has done his greatest service by escorting Mamoulian back out onto the stage and celebrating his many accomplishments as a stage and film director. But Horowitz begins with his own "epiphany" about Gershwin. He had adopted the received opinions about the composer, but then, later, he began identifying almost Wagnerian aspects of his composition, and his opinion escalated. The author then tells the story of the original 1925 novella Porgy by DuBose Heyward. He explains how Heyward and his wife converted it into a stage play and how Mamoulian altered the script, directed the play and became, for a while, a star himself. Horowitz emphasizes Mamoulian's ferocious planning for a production--every movement, rhythm, sound, silence and shadow. And we see, too, how his casts deeply respected and cared for him. Mamoulian went out to Hollywood, and the author talks about each of his films and writes almost in celebration of Love Me Tonight (1932). He carefully describes Mamoulian's contributions to Porgy and Bess and his subsequent success directing the original productions of Oklahoma! and Carousel. He was hired to direct the film of Porgy and Bess, but all fell apart--as did Mamoulian's career. A resurrection story that offers a significant contribution to the history of American popular theater.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
