January 21, 2010
An evening of Gershwin? S’Wonderful, s’marvelous show at Meany Jan. 30
You can spend an evening with composer George Gershwin on Jan. 30, starting with a talk by Music Professor Larry Starr, then a performance of Gershwin’s Broadway songs and finally a Q&A with the performers, moderated by Starr. It’s all part of the World Series at Meany concert, Gershwin on Broadway.
The show features pianist Leon Bates, soprano Louise Toppin and lyric baritone Robert Sims performing such classics as They Can’t Take that Away from Me, S’Wonderful and Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.
Starr, who specializes in music history, is a big fan of George Gershwin, as well he should be. He recently completed a study of the composer’s Broadway music, due to be published in the fall.
“It’s part of a series called Yale Broadway Masters,” he said. “I was asked several times to do the Gershwin book and I always had other projects. But eventually I decided I should probably stop saying no and get it done.”
It wasn’t as if he didn’t already have a good beginning. Before he got involved in the book project, Starr had explored Gershwin from the art music side — the side that produced concert works like Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris and the opera Porgy and Bess. But the book forced him to become acquainted with Gershwin’s Broadway output.
Starr said that while many people know the songs that survived the shows — like the songs to be sung in the concert — the shows themselves are less well known.
“The interesting thing is that many of the shows themselves are remarkable,” he said. “In some cases the shows are fine enough that I think they ought to be considered for revival, particularly Of Thee I Sing, which was the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize. It’s a really terrific political satire.”
Starr also got to explore Porgy and Bess from the Broadway perspective. Although it was written as an opera, Starr explained, the show debuted on Broadway in a shortened version because at the time (1935) there were no African American singers under contract in New York opera houses, and Gershwin was adamant that the roles not be sung by whites in blackface. Because Broadway shows played eight or nine performances a week, some of the music had to be cut to spare the performers’ voices.
Porgy and Bess was a commercial failure, lasting only 124 performances, but then, Starr pointed out, for an opera to last 124 performances on Broadway is something of an achievement. It was not until 1976 that the Houston Grand Opera presented it in an opera house in an essentially uncut version. Since then it’s become a staple of the world’s opera houses. Starr has long admired Porgy and Bess. He was among the scholars who first wrote articles about the piece in the 1980s.
For his talk before the concert, Starr will likely discuss Gershwin’s life. Thanks to his research on the book, he has a treasure trove of anecdotes about the composer, who was the “bad boy” of his upwardly mobile middle class Jewish immigrant family. When George was 10, for example, it was decided that his older brother Ira should have piano lessons. When the piano was brought into the family’s apartment, George sat down and did a very convincing rendition of a popular song — amazing everyone, because no one knew he could play the piano. Evidently he had learned from some friends, watching player pianos, and just assimilated a certain amount off the street.
“So it was decided, as Ira said in his wonderfully understated way, ‘George might prove the better pupil,'” Starr said.
Gershwin soon outgrew his neighborhood music teacher and moved on to a professional one. He quit high school to go to work as a “song plugger” on Tin Pan Alley, meaning that he worked in the offices of song publishers presenting songs on the piano to prospective performers who might perform them in clubs or shows or record them. He also quickly began to write his own material.
“In 1919 he decided to try out to be Irving Berlin’s music secretary,” Starr said. “But after he’d played for Berlin, Berlin said ‘Get out of here. If you’re that good, you don’t want to be anybody’s secretary. You want to be in business for yourself.'”
Gershwin took his advice and had his first hit, Swanee, in 1920 at the age of 22. But his name was really made in 1924, when he had his first sustained Broadway success with Lady, Be Good! and debuted the concert work, Rhapsody in Blue, which had been commissioned by band leader Paul Whiteman. He continued writing music for both the concert hall and the Broadway stage until his early death from a brain tumor in 1937.
“It was an unspeakable tragedy for American music that Gershwin died so young,” Starr said. “You have to wonder, if he’d lived into his 50s and beyond, what he might have given us. For a long time Gershwin was viewed as an anomaly because he was active both in the sphere of popular song/Broadway stage and in the classical concert hall. I would say this is not an anomaly. This represented a then-new but now classic idea of what an American composer should be.”
Gershwin on Broadway is at 8 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 30 in Meany Hall. Tickets are $33, $30 for UW World Series subscribers, and $20 for students. Tickets may be purchased by phone at 206-543-4880, online at www.uwworldseries.org, or in person at the UW Arts Ticket Office. To learn more about this event, click here.
