Sigma Alpha Iota

heard around the world At left, the poster for the current production of The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess. At right, a collection of songs from the 1953 Broadway production featuring SAI Honorary Member Leontyne Price. Ke e p A Goi n' L i ke A So n g E ighty-five years passed between the debut of the novel Porgy and the two Tony awards won June 10 by the Broadway production of The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess. In between, the novel became a play, a landmark opera, a Met production, and a controversial revival. And Sigma Alpha Iota was been a part of it all along. Author DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy, a story of African-Americans in Charleston, SC, was published in 1925. A lifelong resident of Charleston, and a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Heyward cofounded the Poetry Society of South Carolina and co-published Carolina Chansons: Legends of the Low Country, which established his reputation as an American poet. As originally reported in the January 1964 PAN PIPES, Porgy was written while Hayward 12 Porgy and Bess & SAI and wife Dorothy were residents at Sigma Alpha Iota's Pan's Cottage at the MacDowell Colony in Petersborough, NH. The pair had met at the colony a few years before. Founded in 1907, The MacDowell Colony is the oldest artists' colony in the United States. At its founding, the colony was an experiment with no precedent. It stands now having provided crucial time and space to more than 6,000 artists, including such notable names as Leonard Bernstein, Thornton Wilder, Aaron Copland, Milton Avery, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Alice Sebold, Michael Chabon, Suzan-Lori Parks, and many more. SAI financed the construction of Pan's Cottage in 1919 and maintains it via an SAI fund established in 1943. SAI presented a $75,000 gift to the MacDowell Colony in Summer 2007 to restore and preserve Edward MacDowell's music room. The Heywards turned his story into a play PAN PIPESSUMMER 2012 sai-national.org two years after the novel's publication. In 1935, DuBose co-wrote an opera adaptation of the novel with legendary composers George and Ira Gershwin, who saw the work as an opportunity to explore blues and jazz in an operatic structure. Eventually the production was altered to the tastes of musical theatre at the time. The work ran for more than 120 performances and toured nationally. Demands by the cast and crew of this tour resulted in the National Theatre in Washington, D.C., allowing the first integrated audiences in the venue's history. The show was radically transformed for contemporary musical theatre audiences in a 1942 Broadway revival. A 1952 national tour starred SAI Honorary Member Leontyne Price. The U.S. Department of State sponsored a global tour as a cultural representative to the world, and the production was performed at La Scala. The Houston Grand Opera mounted the first

• Cover