The Muses Take a Dive

We saw Borat Saturday past. Very sketchy. It was like being in a part of town where there's a lot of junk clogging the side streets, so that it looks weird and funny, but you look for an escape route. The local Opera had their last performance of Porgy and Bess, so we went and got mixed in with the football traffic. High five, George G! ( ......sort of like Ali G....who was Sascha Cohen...of Borat.) I guess I never read the story before, nor saw the opera, nor saw the films. I did not like the opera one bit. I found the story thin and the characters one dimensional. Even so, this one dimension seemed suspiciously too close to racial stereotypes to be comfortable. I mean, what in the world motivates Bess? Other than the obvious which I will not mention here. If nothing other than the obvious is in Bess, I could stay at home and watch commercials about crack cocaine laboratories being bad for your health. The performers were very good, but the music -other than the famous songs-was uninteresting. Even the well known songs seemed to flash by too quickly to inspire a feeling of reverence. The characters were also so uninteresting that I finally came to admire Crown, the bad guy of the piece, for at least seeming to have some sort of personality. When Crown goes to save Clara, he takes on more meaning than Porgy ever comes close to. It became so bad that I dreaded the inception of another scene. I was in such pain that I didn't know whether to cry or yell or run screaming from the theater. I considered talking back at the stage, something like "Have mercy, Porgy. Cut it short!" Then the audience would either applaud me with enormous relief, or they would turn against me like lions. Either way, it would be a relief. What happened is not clear to me. If this piece of music and drama is as bad as it appeared to me, what could possibly explain its endurance?