Porgy & Bess at the Mother in Law Lounge: Inauguration of a new day at SF Opera

January 20, 2:02 PMSF Opera ExaminerCindy Warner

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Mother in Law lounge owner and singer Ernie K-Doe

Obama’s inauguration speech creates an historic environment for an historic American classic, as Porgy & Bess comes to the San Francisco opera in June. Porgy & Bess has always had a mostly Black cast. It must be feel like quite an evolution since the 1970s when David Gockley first brought Porgy to the stage in Houston. He set the stage back then for today’s atmosphere of hope, charity and kindness set out in Obama’s inauguration speech.
 

I first met such non-White producers of Black music when I lived in New Orleans. During the millennium I worked at the PBS station WLAE TV and lived on the edge of the French Quarter. Musicians seemed to be on every street corner, a part of daily life and I would pass them as I rode my bicycle through Jackson Square. I still ride that bicycle from ten years ago since it survived Katrina. It’s pre-rusted.
 

One day I rode along from my century old townhouse with it’s veranda and hitching posts and oak trees and headed into the Quarter as usual. I came across a big gathering at Hula Mae’s of all places. It’s the tropically named laundry mat at Rampart and Esplanade. The gathering turned out to include musicians like Fats Domino, Ernie K-Doe, John Cleary the Absolute Monster Gentleman, Tony Green the painter and gypsy jazz guitarist and many others. These mature musicians in their forties and older came to honor the man who first recorded them, Cosimo Matassa. Hula Mae’s had been his first recording studio in this building on the edge of the French Quarter erected in the mid 1850s.

Ernie K-Doe of Mother in Law fame signed his autograph and posed for a picture too.  So ten years later I'm back at home in California and during the Obamian inaugural festivities I thought how proud and honored Ernie would be. Katie Couric was commentating and said she had asked about Obama’s mother in law moving in. Remember that song? Katie said. Isn’t it like a sitcom? Ernie actually had a lounge by the same name of the song and I have his business card with his autograph on it. It was a flamboyant bright pink to match his look in general. I still remember the crazy suit, the big hair, the long fingernails and the many rings.
 

Cosimo Matassa the producer himself was there.  He posed in front of black and white pictures hung in the back near the laundry folding table and he even posed for a picture with me, a walk-in. It was a sunny and cold winter day much like today and I had my hair tucked into a wool beanie and wore a black leather jacket and turtleneck and no make-up. I wasn’t expecting company but at least I had clean clothes on.

Fats Domino had a piano set up in the little window at the front of the laundrymat and he played On Blueberry Hill.  

Little did I know then that my work in the studio at WLAE would lead to a day of interviewing musicians at JazzFest. Ron Yager, one of the directors I worked for, gave me a break from the studio and let me log tape for him at JazzFest, with Sting and Lenny Kravitz headlining. He had invited me into the trailer to watch him direct Dr. John and he had about six screens going at once with six cameramen at the stage, a big Australian cameraman hovering over the audience on a gib. One day the coordinator handed me the clipboard and said “go”.

I was to interview musicians backstage including Charmaine Neville. In New Orleans that’s a big family affair with everybody hovering from children and wives to grandfathers and other patriarchs. Children learn music before they are even born. Similarly Charmaine Neville had pulled me up on stage with her at Snug Harbor. She gave me a percussion instrument like a martini shaker and I had to sing Don’t Stop the Carnival. Now I had her in my chair so it was my turn to put her on the spot.
 

So this is my history as a forty year old White woman living the millennium in the South. I learned about non-Blacks producing Black music and that’s how I have come to write about San Francisco’s production of Porgy & Bess.

In closing, I thought the millennium was a different time, when the world looked to the future as something to join together over en masse, to celebrate with anticipation and wonder. After 9/11 and Katrina I felt those days were gone forever but I see America has inaugurated a new day. We will outlast you, says Obama.
 

Immortality: The San Francisco Opera says George Gershwin originally conceived Porgy and Bess as an “American folk opera” and hoped it would have its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera, a suggestion that was refused because the of the controversial nature of the subject matter. Porgy and Bess was consequently reworked as a musical theater piece and opened on Broadway in 1935 with a cast of all African-American artists–an extremely bold move given the segregationist views of the era. The work enjoyed more than 40 years in the musical theater repertoire, with several significant revivals and a film version starring Sydney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge in the title roles. Houston Grand Opera (HGO), under the leadership of David Gockley, presented Gershwin’s original opera for the very first time on the operatic stage in 1976. The production established Porgy and Bess as one of the greatest American operas and earned HGO a Tony Award, a Grammy Award and the Grand Prix du Disque.  San Francisco Opera quickly followed suit and presented the HGO production in 1977, with subsequent performances in 1987 and 1995.

Sung in English with English supertitles, the seven performances of Porgy and Bess are scheduled for June 9 (8 p.m.), June 12 (8 p.m.), June 14 (7:30 p.m.), June 18 (7:30 p.m.), June 21 (2 p.m.), June 24 (7:30 p.m.) and June 27 (8 p.m.), 2009. San Francisco Opera’s Summer 2009

  Photos by Cindy Warner, New Orleans  1999/2000
 

  Copyright2000CindyWarner

  Porgy photo left courtesy of SF Opera.