"Bring my goat " Porgy exclaims in the final scene of Gershwin s
opera Porgy and Bess. Bess, whom he loves, has left for New York
City, and he s determined to find her. When his request is met with
astonishment New York is a great distance from South Carolina s
Catfish Row Porgy remains undaunted. He mounts his goat-cart and
leads the community in an ecstatic finale, "Oh Lawd, I m on my
way."
Stephen Sondheim has called "Bring my goat " "one of the most
moving moments in musical theater history." For years it was
assumed that DuBose Heyward the author of the seminal novella and
subsequent play, Porgy, and later the librettist for the opera
Porgy and Bess penned this historic line. In fact, both it and "Oh
Lawd, I'm on my way" were added to the play eight years earlier by
that production s unheralded architect: Rouben Mamoulian. Porgy and
Bess as we know it would not exist without the contributions of
this master director.
Culling new information from the recently opened Mamoulian
Archives at the Library of Congress, award-winning author Joseph
Horowitz shows that, more than anyone else, Mamoulian took
Heyward's vignette of a regional African-American subculture and
transformed it into an epic theater work, a universal parable of
suffering and redemption. Part biography, part revelatory history,
"On My Way" re-creates Mamoulian's visionary style on stage and
screen, his collaboration with George Gershwin, and the genesis of
the opera that changed the face of American musical life."
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