THE GERSHWINS' PORGY AND BESS is the classic American tale is set in the 1930s in Catfish Row, a neighborhood in Charleston, South Carolina. Bess, beautiful and troubled, turns to Porgy, the crippled beggar, in search of safety after her possessive lover Crown commits murder. As Porgy and Bess's love grows, their future is threatened by Crown and the conniving Sporting Life. This heartbreaking love story boasts some of the most famous and beloved works from the Great American Songbook, including: "Summertime," "Bess, You Is My Woman," "It Ain't Necessarily So" and "I Loves You, Porgy."
For all the controversy that has surrounded Diane Paulus' revisionist Broadway revival of 'Porgy and Bess,' or, as it now is billed, 'The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess,' the considerable strengths of this production, which opened Thursday night at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, are in the traditional pleasures of witnessing a passionate, beautifully sung, richly visualized, splendidly played and indisputably well-intentioned 'Porgy.' This is a great American opera filled with breathtaking stakes, towering characters and a thudding naturalistic intensity. The considerable weaknesses don't really flow from cuts in the running time or the textual changes (the work of adapters Suzan-Lori Parks and Diedre L. Murray) designed to make this show more palatable for modern Broadway tastes and that famously aggrieved Stephen Sondheim, who stood in solidarity with the original librettist, DuBose Heyward, and preemptively howled against a proposed, but now abandoned, new ending wherein Bess returns to Catfish Row. They have all been overhyped and overdiscussed.
In working out their approach to the celebrated folk opera, during rehearsals and an out-of-town tryout, director Diane Paulus and adaptors Suzan-Lori Parks and Diedre L. Murray pretty much circled back to the original 1935 show created by George and Ira Gershwin and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward. Aside from turning some sung sections into spoken dialogue, adding small details about the characters and incorporating a few new staging ideas, this is a traditional rendering of the lives of the poor black inhabitants of Catfish Row in Charleston, S.C.
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