"On My Way": The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and Porgy and Bess
*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! --Ray Olson