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Henry Stewart turns up plenty o' somethin' about Gershwin's legendary but problematic "folk opera."
First Performances
Porgy and Bess was first publicly performed on September 30,1935, in Boston, a tryout for its Broadway debut ten days laterjust a few months before the Metropolitan Opera Guild published its first bulletin, which soon became OPERA NEWS. Porgy didn't make it to the Met until 1985. This millennium, a major production has traveled to Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., but until the '70s, when its status in opera circles improved, you had a better chance of seeing the show on Broadway, where it was revived in 1942,1943, 1944,1953, etc., and as recently as 2012, when Diane Paulus's controversial but generally well-received production starred a revelatory Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis, half-speaking Porgy's songs as if still playing Javert.
The Basics
The title's disabled man and drag-addicted woman fall in love. He kills her abusive boyfriend, and while he's briefly in police custody, she goes to New York with her dealer.
< Reactions
"Neutrality about Porgy and Bess is impossible." Foster Hirsch once wrote in OPERA NEWS. "Did a quartet of white artists... create a true work about black characters? Or... a pageant of demeaning racial stereotypes?" (Real dialogue from the source novel, by DuBose Heyward: "Ef I wuz yo' age, an' er man. I'd sabe my sof wo'd fer de Gawd-farin' ladies.") Frank Durham writes diplomatically in his 1954 Heyward biography, "To [Heyward] and the reader, this Negro is a human being......