Shorter, Modern and Less Than Opera

Broadway shows this season have experienced more controversy and critical hand-wringing before opening night than "The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess," a new version of the classic opera that debuted last year at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., and that bowed this week at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in New York.


This revised production features cuts and revisions by Suzan Lori-Parks and Diedre L. Murray. Last year, composer Stephen Sondheim wrote a harsh letter that was published in the New York Times in which he attacked the show, sight unseen.


"Porgy," directed by Diane Paulus, stars Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis as the title characters. The show has undergone further streamlining since its A.R.T. debut last year.


How have critics reacted? The responses have so far been all over the map.


Ben Brantley of the New York Times reviewed the production during its debut in Massachusetts and has revisited it in New York. Overall, "the show is much improved, clearer and more fluid, than it was in Cambridge." At times, this slimmed-down opera "sometimes feels skeletal." As Bess, McDonald is "great; the show in which she appears is, at best, just pretty good."
The Chicago Tribune's Chris Jones wrote that the much talked-about changes and cuts to the opera have been "overhyped and overdiscussed." In the end, the "limitations of the production flow from the same fundamental issues that have applied since this piece was first seen in 1935.


Opera companies are not innocents when it comes to making cuts in works. But at least with standard repertory, such cuts tend to be nicks and trims, or an aria for a minor character generally considered superfluous, not whole sections of a score. I cannot be sure, but a good third of the original “Porgy and Bess” seems gone in this adaptation.


The intimacy of the production is a selling point. In the scene at Serena’s home, it is moving to see just a dozen or so choristers, her Catfish Row neighbors, singing the despondent, descending chords of “Gone, Gone, Gone” as they huddle over the laid-out body of Serena’s husband, Robbins. He has been killed in a fight with the brutish stevedore Crown, here the imposing Phillip Boykin. (That fight is depicted by Gershwin in a frenzied orchestral fugue, but the effect in this version was nothing like what you experience when an opera orchestra plays it at full tilt and complete.)


As Serena, Bryonha Marie Parham conveys the new widow’s shocking grief. But her singing of “My Man’s Gone Now” is reticent, and the orchestra almost disappears. This song can knock you out when a full-voiced, throbbing Serena is backed by an opera-house orchestra bustling with Gershwin’s whiplash flute riffs and pummeling percussion.


This “Porgy and Bess” certainly has its moments, and the adaptation comes across as a good-faith effort to try something different. As Ms. McDonald said in the Times interview, the opera “will always exist to be performed.”