When writers' names are part of the title

When Jeffrey Richards says, "I only do things with authors' names in the titles," he is being playful -- sort of.

As lead producer of "The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess," Richards has been fielding questions -- mostly impolite -- about the estate-ordered identification slapped like a designer label on the title of the classic 1935 folk opera.

However one feels about Broadway's wildly controversial, willfully rearranged but (to my mind) still gripping and luscious new revival, there is almost universal dismay over that ungainly, even misleading appendage -- "The Gershwins'."

I now know the answer, or at least an explanation, from the head of the Ira Gershwin estate. But first let's look at the other titles Richards happens -- coincidentally, I'm sure -- to be producing this year.

Previews begin March 6 for "Gore Vidal's The Best Man," a political-campaign drama that was simply called "The Best Man" at its 1960 premiere.

And "Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" opens Oct. 13 in the acclaimed production from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. This will be 50 years to the day that his best-known masterwork first opened on Broadway, without the playwright's name in the title. Albee's name was part of the title of the 2005 revival starring Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin, when the play was listed in the alphabetical newspaper ads (called the ABCs) under "E" for Edward, not "W" for Who's.

The term is possessory billing, a closely held privilege for such a master as Albee and an increasingly desirable perk for lesser lights, mostly in the movie business. According to Donald Aslan, business-affairs attorney at the William Morris Endeavor, Albee's name has been inseparable from his work at least since Aslan arrived in 1978.

"We issue contracts basically phrased that his name is part of the title," says Aslan, who adds that the only "push back" has come from foreign productions where the language can be problematic. In general, he says, "Once the name is part of the title, you don't get into arguments about billing." As a collateral benefit, the playwright can never again be left off a Playbill cover.

Albee was clearly ahead of his time. The first time I noticed possessory billing was "The Who's Tommy" in 1993. This awkwardness was obviously needed to differentiate from the album "Tommy" and the movie "Tommy." And, especially in the days when rock and roll was ersatz or nonexistent on Broadway, it couldn't have hurt to blast the brand name of the real thing between the quotation marks.

"The Best Man," which has an amazing cast, including James Earl Jones, Angela Lansbury and Candice Bergen, has a similar reason to be attached to its author forevermore. Richards, who first produced the play to coincide with the 2000 Bush-Gore election, says he proposed the new official title to distinguish from the 1999 Taye Diggs movie about a wedding.

According to Richards, Vidal was delighted, exclaiming, "Jeffrey! I thought you would never ask! What a splendid idea!"

George and Ira Gershwin are not around to consult about their names on "Porgy and Bess." George, the composer, died in 1937 at age 38. Lyricist Ira died in 1983 at 87. But the title is one of the changes that made Stephen Sondheim furious during the show's tryout in Cambridge, Mass., last summer. Although Ira contributed to the show, making the title "The Gershwins'" is believed to magnify his part and shut out the book written by Dorothy and DuBose Heyward, who also wrote most of the splendid lyrics.

Michael Strunsky, trustee of Ira Gershwin's estate, confides to being a little shell-shocked by negative reaction to what he considers a fair acknowledgment of Ira's underacknowledged work on the show. A nephew by marriage to Ira, he was asked by his aunt Leonore to get involved in 1984. "This was not my world," says Strunsky, a San Francisco businessman who became trustee in the early '90s.

At that time, he says, the show was called "George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess," a "marketing decision telling the public that, even though this was about a black community, it was a Gershwin show -- or opera." At a revival in Buenos Aires in the early '90s, he said to the composer's trustees, "Hey, guys, that's not fair. You are shortchanging Ira."

Right there, the friends came up with "The Gershwins'," a title that, since then, appears to have been used "whenever anybody called us for a license." He says the Heyward estate was run by a lawyer "who had no objections" to their being left out of the title. "It's all my fault. ... I wanted Ira recognized," he says, claiming that "nobody has ever bitched about it until now.

"How casually we treated this for the last 25 years," he says, pointing me to page 91 of Hollis Alpert's 1990 book, "The Life and Times of Porgy and Bess," which reports the little-known history of separate song credits for DuBose Heyward and for Ira Gershwin.

Albee has made sure there would never be any such ambiguity about his contribution. Jonathan Lomma, his agent, says, "He is a master of his craft. This puts him in the forefront of protecting the playwright's rights. In the theater, playwrights own and control their work. That is why they write for the theater and not the movies, where they could make so much more."

Elizabeth McCann, the clever and smart veteran producer of virtually all of Albee's work for decades, says, "Edward's name has always been part of the title. This has implications down the line in billing clauses."

Besides, she asks, challenging the system, "Who will protect the playwright when he is dead? You try to find the word 'Shakespeare' on 'Merchant of Venice.'It's 'Al Pacino in ''Merchant of Venice.'''"

We're not likely to see "Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George," unless author-lyricist James Lapine is worked into the title. But what about "Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman" or, while we're at it, "Linda Winer's Fanfare Column"? Now that one sings.