| . | 03/11/2002
Porgy
By: Bruce-Michael Gelbert
Photo by Carol Rosegg
| A lustrous realization of George Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess," triple cast and guided by conductor John DeMain and director Tazewell Thompson, opened the New York City Opera's Spring Season, at the New York State Theater at the beginning of March. I heard the second cast on March 8. DeMain and the large, polished ensemble make the timeless, thrice-familiar melodies sound fresh, with especially noteworthy choral work in the complex storm scene, which inspired a similar scene in Benjamin Britten's "Peter Grimes." Thompson has galvanized the forces into a believable community of Catfish Row, beset with superstition, drugs and violence, but tight-knit and supportive. Fatal fight scenes, between Crown and Robbins and then Crown and Porgy, devised by Roddy Kinter; brushes with the brutal, Caucasian pillars of the law; and Bess' return to drugs, after she'd been clean, are painfully realistic here.
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The one miscalculation is that Bess' confrontation with and abduction by Crown, on Kittiwah Island, begins before a boatload of happy picnickers, apparently blithely unaware of either of the drama nearby or the fact that Bess had not rejoined them.
While some of the protagonists' lines seem to lie below these singers' fullest resonance, company newcomers Leonard Rowe, as Porgy, and Marsha Thompson, as Bess, nonetheless manage a pair of lyrical love duets, "Bess, you is my woman now" and "I wants to stay here" ("I loves you, Porgy"). The former offers expansive accounts of "I got plenty o' nuttin'" and "Buzzard, keep on flying." The latter, dressed at first in bright red until her quest for acceptance in the community, when she adopts hues as muted as theirs, proves adept in the higher-lying "Oh the train is at the station" and reprise of Clara's "Summertime."
Timothy Robert Blevins makes a swaggering, resonant Crown and sparks fly during his picnic scene duet with Thompson, who aptly conveys Bess' ambivalence about resisting the well-built ne'er-do-well. Monique McDonald, as Serena, delivers an opulent, moving "My man's gone now," taking the wide range of this demanding solo and of the prayer she leads in the storm scene very much in her stride. She aptly conveys more reluctance than the others to accepting Bess, her spouse's murderer, Crown's erstwhile lover, even after Bess' alliance with Porgy begins.
Portraying Clara, Adina Aaron starts the evening off on a bright note, with her dulcet "Summertime." Making a suitably sleazy Sportin' Life, the pusher, Dwayne Clark lends an incisive tenor to his vivid "It ain't necessarily so" and "There's a boat dat's leavin' soon." He is told off, in no uncertain terms, by meat cleaver wielding earth mother alto Sabrina Elayne Carten as Catfish Row's "drug czarina," Maria. David Aron Damane, Michael Austin, and Shirley Russ take other leading roles. Designs are by Douglas W. Schmidt (sets), Nancy Potts (costumes), and Robert Wierzel (lighting).
New York City Opera at New York State Theater, Lincoln Center. 212/307-4100. Plays in repertory with other operas through March 22. PBS telecast March 20. $25, 35, 65, 75, 90, 92, 98 (Tuesday-Friday), $30, 49, 60, 70, 80, 95, 98, 105 (Saturday & Sunday). |
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