The Most Moving Songs Ever

Director Diane Paulus, a Tony Award nominee for the 2008 revival of Hair and the artistic director of A.R.T., is at the helm and actively involved in the new vision for Porgy and Bess .  (Paulus, with the blessing of living authors Galt MacDermot and James Rado, was also given major creative authority over the Tony Award-winning revival of Hair , which was structurally different than the 1968 original.)

Sondheim, who along with collaborators George Furth, James Goldman, Hugh Wheeler and James Lapine (to name a few), has mined the complex depths of human emotions and psyche, disagrees with Paulus' beliefs that there is not enough back story, or emotional clarity to the inhabitants of Catfish Row. The current team is at work authoring additional material to give audiences what they feel will be a more rounded vision of the characters in Porgy and Bess .

"These characters are as vivid as any ever created for the musical theatre, as has been proved over and over in productions that may have cut some dialogue and musical passages but didn’t rewrite and distort them," Sondheim asserted.

He continued: "Among the ways in which Ms. Parks defends the excavation work is this: 'I wanted to flesh out the two main characters so that they are not cardboard cut-out characters' and goes on to say, 'I think that’s what George Gershwin wanted, and if he had lived longer he would have gone back to the story of Porgy and Bess and made changes, including the ending.'"

"It's reassuring that Ms. Parks has a direct pipeline to Gershwin and is just carrying out his work for him, and that she thinks he would have taken one of the most moving moments in musical theater history — Porgy's demand, 'Bring my goat!' — and thrown it out. Ms. Parks (or Ms. Paulus) has taken away Porgy's goat cart in favor of a cane. So now he can demand, 'Bring my cane!' Perhaps someone will bring him a straw hat too, so he can buck-and-wing his way to New York.