Midway through hell week for Porgy & Bess, I'm beginning to feel better about the weekend's show.
My choir is doing P&B with the ASO and a group of professional soloists on Friday and Saturday night. It's a sung performance, not acted, which makes the fact that all but two members of the choir are Caucasian slightly more acceptable. As I told my neighbor, I never feel whiter than when I'm asked to sing a spiritual, and P&B was written in dialect, to the point that we've actually had textual issues.
On one song, we have a one-line echo of the soloist, which many of us interpreted as "Since she lost her man." Nice and grammatically correct, right? Wrong. "Read the words!" our pianist finally told us in exasperation. "It's 'Since she lose her man!'"
Like I said, we sound so white. The soloists, fortunately, make up for this by being fabulous. Porgy and Crown are great, but if I make it through "It Ain't Necessarily So" without cracking up - he's that over-the-top - it's going to be a minor miracle.
Anyway, as this is the week before, we've been spending some quality time with Justin Brown and each other, to the point that my nights are shot. Almost makes me feel like I'm back in Glee Club...anyone want to bring Sir David Wilcocks down?
No comments:
Post a Comment